Ushintsho: A Mobile Platform for Mining-related Grievances

Motivation

In the communities that surround large-scale mining sites across the developing world, air and noise pollution disrupts people’s daily lives and environmental degradation threatens their livelihoods. When companies do not adequately address these grievances, they can boil over to protest or violent conflict. In South Africa alone, police recorded 10,000 crowd incidents near mines between 2010 and 2013.

One often-proposed solution to address these complaints and prevent conflict is a grievance redress mechanism. Mining companies set up community relations offices and grievance redress protocols to surface and resolve grievances in the communities in which they work.

Do these mechanisms work? Does establishing a line of communication between community and company lead to grievances being identified and resolved? We sought to answer that question by piloting an independent and transparent grievance redress platform in three mining communities in South Africa.

The Pilot

We partnered with Oxfam South Africa, the grassroots organization Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), and the social enterprise Ulula to develop and pilot a mobile-based grievance redress platform. The platform, named Ushintsho, enabled citizens to freely and anonymously submit mining related complaints via SMS or voice call