As part of our ongoing work to advocate for a gender-just transition, we’ve been exploring how feminist perspectives reshape climate policy, from global negotiations to grassroots solutions. We’ve looked at the critical role of care work, challenged dominant models of systems change, and called for climate action that centers equity and justice.

Alongside policy and advocacy, we believe that deep, thoughtful conversations are essential for learning, reflection, and connection across movements.

In the second installment of our Critical Conversations series, we speak with Melania (Mela) Chiponda, a longtime human rights defender and energy justice advocate based in Harare, Zimbabwe. For decades, Mela has challenged exploitative mining projects and their impacts on communities, especially on women in rural areas.

She currently serves as Director of the SHINE Collab, which works at the intersection of gender and energy justice to build community-driven, renewable, just energy solutions.

As a leading voice in the feminist energy space, Mela has consistently raised critical questions about the human rights implications of the global rush for critical minerals, an issue we were eager to explore with her in the context of just transition.

The transcribed interview below has been edited for length and clarity. 

Mara from WEDO: Your analysis of a gender-just transition is deeply rooted in your understanding of the lived experiences of communities most impacted by the climate crisis and the transition to minerals mining. Can you tell us more about Bikita, in particular, and why this story is so important to your advocacy around a just transition?

Mela: The story of Bikita is very critical, particularly at this moment, when the whole world is talking about transitioning from fossil fuel-driven development to renewable energy. Bikita hosts the biggest lithium find in Zimbabwe, and Zimbabwe has the largest lithium deposits on the continent, sixth in the world. The challenge now is that lithium is being extracted in ways that are extremely harmful to ecosystems, to women’s bodies, and to women’s well-being, taking away women’s dignity and the sense of community.

This is a community that has stayed on the same piece of land for 300-plus years. They have their sacred sites, their ancestral graves, and a deep connection with their land. The transition process fails to take into consideration how we protect the rights, dignity, and well-being of the communities that are hosting the critical minerals that are needed in the renewable energy sector. We are replacing extractivism that was driven by fossil fuels by decarbonization extractivism, but the idea remains the same. 

As we are talking about critical minerals, how do we ensure that we mine after getting consent from the affected communities, respecting their human rights, their human dignity, and the rights of those who are most vulnerable, while also making sure that they have access to energy? We cannot extract lithium while the community hosting the mineral cannot even afford lithium batteries. They cannot afford the very basic technologies that are coming from the minerals that they are hosting. There should be a mechanism to ensure that justice starts from the extraction point.

Mara from WEDO: We know that “green” or “clean” energy often still relies on exploitation and human rights abuses, as you were just describing. Can you tell us why this binary of “clean vs dirty energy” is problematic, and how we need to add nuance to our assessment of what goes into creating renewable energy?

Mela: This binary is problematic because we are not questioning the system. It is a very uncomfortable conversation to say: we are using these gadgets, we have renewable energy in our homes, now let us start checking where they came from. Let us look at the violence that is happening in the DR of Congo, and therefore, ask ourselves critical questions like, Is this clean energy? When we talk about clean energy, I do not want to look at it as either this is fossil fuels or this is renewable energy.

We need to address a system that will ensure that the people who have access to fossil fuel-driven energy now continue to have energy after the transition. But a just transition is not about technology only. A just transition is supposed to look at a whole array of rights and entitlements, and also take the duty bearers to account. Because the moment we start thinking in binaries, then it means we are not going to question the violations. We are not going to question the dispossession. We are not going to question why people are continuing to live in energy poverty as we are transitioning. Out of the 685 million people across the world without access to energy, 600 million live in Africa. Most of them are living in rural areas, and we know most of the rural areas in Zimbabwe are hosting critical minerals.

For me, energy should be considered as part of the commons, not a commodity. It should be treated as a right, and everyone should have access to it. It should not be reserved for people who can afford it. It is critical for people’s health, for people’s well-being, for people’s dignity. So it’s not an either-or. It’s not an either-or.

Mara from WEDO: One of the strategies that you talk a lot about at SHINE is putting energy directly into women’s hands. Why is this practical step around ownership and delivery of energy services so important, especially in the context of unequal access to energy and many other resources?

Mela: When we have meetings in communities, we often discuss: why are we talking about putting energy into women’s hands when it is already in women’s hands? We only see women as users of energy, but we are not looking at how they manage energy resources at the household level as well as at the community level. Why do we not acknowledge this critical role that they play?

It’s because we invisibilize the work that is being done by women. When we look at who is managing our energy systems, who is making sure to put food on the table, and the process that happened before that food was on the table, we see how women were managing the energy systems, the food systems, water, everything. And then I ask myself, why is it that institutions want to treat women as just users, and not those having to make decisions about energy systems? 

But they do make decisions on energy systems at the household level and the community level. That women are excluded from decision-making processes in the energy sector is deliberate. It is deliberate because energy is power — not only power in terms of the power that we see as the lightbulb, or the power that we see as the energy that we are using, but power as in the power to make decisions.

Patriarchy is part of the system within institutions. The idea of sharing power is something that we see mostly in communities and with Indigenous Peoples, where power is not vested in one person or one institution, but shared. Within a neoliberal capitalist agenda, power is not supposed to be shared. Therefore, the failure of energy institution systems to not have women as part of decision-making and policy-making processes is a power issue. It is because they are not considering women as having “the technical expertise.” 

We had a meeting last year as the SHINE Collab, where we brought together women-led power enterprises, women from Bikita, and women from other communities who are living in energy poverty. One thing that came out of that meeting was that women in rural areas know that they suffer from financial exclusion, and they have village banks, where they bring their resources together and lend each other money at interest. They can buy solar-powered pumps, repair their solar-powered boreholes, and use them as a community. Now tell me why women are not in decision-making processes, when they are already making decisions? Tell me why they shouldn’t be in policymaking processes when they are coming up with solutions that work

Mara from WEDO: We know that there are frontline communities all over the world who, like Bikita, are facing the impacts of critical minerals mining without sharing in any of the benefits, especially across the Global South and the continent of Africa. How are you connecting these communities and working with women who are challenging these mining realities across their different contexts? What are you hearing and learning? 

Mela: This March, we brought community members together and shared the story of Bikita with international NGOs and people from many countries. People tuned in from DR of Congo and from South Africa, where, with our partner Earthlife, we are working with communities who are impacted by the mine closures. Creating those spaces creates this powerful space of solidarity and learning. For example, when we bring together communities from Kenya who are affected by geothermal mining and communities in Lake Turkana who are affected by wind farms, they share struggles, they share solutions, they learn from each other. 

That comes together with the work that we are doing to pilot renewable energy services. We don’t want to continue theorizing about communities or just writing about community struggles. We want to pilot what the community is saying. Let’s put it into practice. Let’s see if this can be replicated. Let’s see how we can multiply this. Let’s see how this can be an opportunity to learn.

Communities are imagining food processing using renewable energy services. They are imagining every household having energy for lighting. They are imagining their health centers having energy for refrigerating vaccines. They are imagining maternal health care with health care facilities that are electrified. And for us, we are saying, let us pilot and see what this looks like.

Why not create spaces to imagine how the mining of critical minerals can go beyond the UN framework on critical minerals? Is this framework adequate to ensure that corporations and governments are taken into account? How do we make this mandatory and not inadequate corporate social responsibility and political grandstanding by corporations and by governments? How do we go beyond that? How do we make sure that those frameworks that are developed at the UN level actually work for communities? 

This is a framework that has to be contextualised within communities, without saying this is a one-size-fits-all. As we were sharing the UN framework on critical minerals with the community in Bikita, they were asking questions like: If they abuse our rights, are they going to be prosecuted? Who is going to be prosecuted? If they cannot be prosecuted, what is the point of this framework? 

These are very critical questions that communities are asking that we need to learn from. When we engage with these multilateral institutions, let us pose those questions that communities are posing.

Learn more about Mela’s work with the SHINE collab.