Last week in Bulawayo, alongside Mine Entra 2026, we sat down with communities living on top of Zimbabwe’s critical minerals. The sessions were coordinated by the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association with support from the Southern Africa Trust. The purpose was to ask the people closest to the deposits what they are actually experiencing. We also asked how they see this boom, and how they can be positioned to benefit from the resources they host and own.

Mine Entra ran under the theme “Unearth, Transform, Prosper: Anchoring Economic Transformation through Mining Value Chains”. In the exhibition halls, the conversation was about beneficiation, equipment and investment. In our sessions, it was about centring communities, women and youth in the critical minerals discourse. What stood out for me was the pervasiveness of conflict as mining continues. Conflict over land. Conflict over water. Conflict over who was consulted and who was merely informed. Conflict between neighbours, between generations, and between villagers and the leaders meant to speak for them.

I have spent years joining others in arguing that Africa must stop exporting rock and start capturing value. I left the space holding that position even more strongly. Sitting in those sessions, I understood that the argument is incomplete. A country can beneficiate every gram of lithium it digs and still hand its communities a decade of grievance. The value question and the consent question are separate questions, and Zimbabwe risks answering only one of them.

Zimbabwe is getting the value question right

Credit where it is due, because the policy record here is real.

In February 2026 Zimbabwe suspended exports of unbeneficiated minerals, including lithium concentrate, requiring processing into lithium sulphate at home. A full ban on raw exports follows in January 2027. Zimbabwe is the largest lithium producer in Africa and among the largest in the world, and it has used that position to insist on domestic value addition rather than accepting the old arrangement of exporting rock and importing batteries.

The continental framing has moved too. The African Union adopted the Africa Green Minerals Strategy in February 2025, rooted in the African Mining Vision of 2009. UNECA launched a six-country critical minerals value chain programme in Lusaka in June 2026, running to 2031 and covering the DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. South Africa published its own Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy in May 2025.

And after nearly a decade of drafting and revision, the Mines and Minerals Bill was gazetted in June 2025. It offers the first serious opportunity in a generation to replace a 1961 statute that was written for a different country and a different purpose.

This is a government that has decided minerals should build the national economy. That decision is the right one, and it creates the opening for the next task, which is a shared one. Making sure those minerals also build the districts they come from.

What communities are carrying

The evidence from the ground is specific, documented and fixable.

In Buhera, 41 families were moved to make way for the Sabi Star lithium mine, operated by Max Mind Investments, which was granted more than 55 claims in the area in September 2021. Peer-reviewed research on the resettlement found that families were promised houses and jobs, and were told they risked losing everything if they declined. They asked for US$3,000 in initial compensation and received US$1,000. The replacement houses were smaller than promised and developed cracks within four months. The dam they had relied on for irrigation and livestock was taken over by the mine. Graves were exhumed. One household of 22 people was allocated a single five-bedroom house.

The same research found that affected families did not know the Mines and Minerals Act allowed them to take their case to the Administrative Court. They accepted what was offered because nobody told them there was an alternative. That is a procedural gap, and procedural gaps can be closed by statute.

Around Bikita and Mberengwa the pattern is quieter. Families stay where they are while access to grazing land, water and fields is cut off. Because nobody is relocated, compensation is rarely triggered at all.

In artisanal gold, the conflict has been open for years. Syndicates have fought over claims in Kadoma and Kwekwe, and people have died. Government has responded, through enforcement operations and specialised courts for prosecuting the syndicates. Enforcement treats the symptom. The drivers are well documented: unemployment, the absence of legal title for small operators, and the profitability of gold. Those are economic conditions, and economic conditions respond to policy rather than to policing.

None of this appears in export figures. It is real, it compounds, and it is the single largest threat to the social licence that a beneficiation strategy depends on.

The region shows what happens if this is left too long

Eastern DRC is the case nobody wants to become. Armed groups have financed themselves through coltan, gold and tin for three decades. M23 holds Goma and Bukavu. United Nations experts have documented the movement of minerals from occupied areas into legitimate supply chains.

The international response has been to put mineral access on the table as part of the settlement. A United States-brokered agreement between the DRC and Rwanda was signed in June 2025, followed by the Washington Accords in December 2025, opening Congolese cobalt, copper, coltan and rare earths to Western firms. Peace is worth pursuing, and the diplomacy deserves support.

The design risk is worth naming plainly. An agreement that trades mineral access for a ceasefire, negotiated above the heads of the communities living on the deposits, leaves the underlying structure intact. It changes who collects the rent. It does not change who is consulted. Zimbabwe is in a very different position, and the lesson still travels: when minerals become valuable, decisions migrate upward and outward, and grievance accumulates quietly until it does not.

The rules are being written right now

Europe is moving quickly. The Critical Raw Materials Act gave the EU binding supply targets and a mechanism to designate strategic projects. Forty-seven projects inside the EU were approved in March 2025 and thirteen outside it in June 2025, four of them in Africa: Malawi, Madagascar, South Africa and Zambia. A second application round closed in January 2026. The EU has signed critical minerals partnerships with South Africa, Rwanda, Namibia, the DRC and Zambia, supported by the Global Gateway commitment to mobilise €300 billion.

In February 2025 the European Parliament called for the Rwanda partnership to be suspended over the conflict in the DRC. That vote matters, because it shows that supply security and community harm are already colliding inside European institutions, and the question of how to reconcile them is open.

That is the opportunity. Standards for these partnerships are being drafted now. African governments and African civil society can shape what counts as a responsible project, or accept a definition written elsewhere. Zimbabwe, which sits outside the current EU partnership list, has room to define its own terms and to arrive at the table with a governance model rather than a grievance.

Women and young people carry the costs first

Women are about 15% of the global mining workforce and as much as half of everyone working in artisanal and small-scale mining. In mining communities they absorb the losses before anyone else. When the dam is enclosed, the walk for water lengthens, and a woman or a girl walks it. When farmland goes and the household shifts to wage-seeking, unpaid work closes the gap. When a mining camp arrives, transactional sex, harassment and violence arrive with it, and the services to respond rarely follow.

The industry has been slow. Research covering 43 critical mineral exploration and production companies found five that had committed to assessing the gendered impact of their operations on surrounding communities. None had recognised ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the world of work.

Young people are the other group holding the cost. They dominate artisanal mining, and without legal title, finance or a route into the formal sector, the violent end of the industry is often the only end open to them. Formalisation is also a youth employment policy, and it has not yet been used as one.

There is a commercial version of this argument for anyone who needs one. Community conflict halts production, and stoppages have been costed at up to US$20 million a week. Violence against women and girls costs roughly 2% of global GDP. Inclusive mineral governance is cheaper than the alternative. The bill for exclusion simply arrives later, and usually at someone else’s address.

Gwanda shows the model already exists

This is the part policymakers can sit with, because Zimbabwe does not need to import a solution. It built one.

The Gwanda Community Share Ownership Trust holds 10% of Blanket Mine, operated by Caledonia Mining. Blanket advanced roughly US$4 million in dividends in 2012 and 2013 to get the Trust operating. Cumulative contributions since 2012 are approximately US$16.4 million. Payments have continued and grown, including dividends of US$1.5 million and US$1.8 million in recent cycles, and US$5.5 million in a single reporting period. The Trust is chaired by a traditional leader, Chief Mathema, works to a multi-year strategic plan, and has put the money into clinics, schools, water and local enterprise in the district.

Look at why it worked. The community holds an equity stake rather than a promise. The dividend is a contractual entitlement rather than a discretionary donation. The Trust has its own governance, its own plan and its own reporting cycle. The mine treats it as a shareholder obligation. Over a decade, that produced predictable, visible, community-directed investment.

It is not perfect, and the wider record on Community Share Ownership Trusts across Zimbabwe is uneven. Many were launched and never capitalised. That unevenness is the argument for strengthening the model rather than abandoning it. Gwanda shows the design works when the equity is real, the payments are contractual and the governance is genuine.

What would move this forward

Five things, and none of them are new ideas. Most already sit somewhere in Zimbabwean policy. What they need is legal force and financing.

Scale what already works. Make the Community Share Ownership Trust model statutory rather than voluntary, with a minimum equity share, a contractual dividend obligation, published accounts and a real community majority on the board. Gwanda is the template. Write it into the Mines and Minerals Bill and the sector gains a working benefit-sharing mechanism instead of twenty separate negotiations.

Consent that includes the right to decline. Free, prior and informed consent means little if refusal is not an available answer. The Bill should require independent baseline studies before agreements, compensation set against documented loss, mandatory written notice of the right to approach the Administrative Court, and a grievance mechanism reachable without a lawyer in Harare.

Civic intelligence as a formal input. What communities know about their own conflicts is the most accurate early warning system available. It is currently gathered by civil society on project funding, and it rarely reaches the desks where licensing decisions are made. Fund it, publish it, and route it into those decisions. Sessions like the ones in Bulawayo could feed a register that regulators consult as a matter of course.

Gender and youth written into the licence. Make a gender and GBV risk assessment a condition of holding a mining title rather than an annexe to a corporate social responsibility report. Ratify and implement ILO Convention 190. Formalise women and young people in artisanal mining with genuine title and access to finance, because a miner without a claim has no standing when the violence starts.

A regional floor. Companies compare jurisdictions. SADC should agree a minimum standard on consent, compensation and community benefit so that the weakest regulator does not set the regional price. Zimbabwe, which has both the constitutional provision and a working trust model, is well placed to table it. Section 13(4) of the Constitution already requires the State to ensure that local communities benefit from the resources in their areas. The instrument exists. What is missing is the machinery to deliver it.

The room and the hall

The boom is happening. Zimbabwe’s lithium will be mined, and the region’s cobalt, graphite and rare earths with it. The open question is whether the wealth beneath our communities becomes the reason they finally get clinics, water and a hearing, or the reason they spend twenty years in dispute.

In Bulawayo last week, the exhibition hall and our sessions were a few minutes apart and were describing the same industry. The people in the hall hold the capital and the licences. The people in our sessions hold the information that determines whether any of it lasts.

Bringing those two rooms together is not complicated, and it is not expensive. It requires treating community consent as part of the value chain rather than a step completed at the end of it. Gwanda already shows what that looks like in practice, in a Zimbabwean district, with Zimbabwean institutions. The work now is to make it the rule rather than the exception.

Sources

1. Mine Entra 2026, Bulawayo, 29 to 31 July 2026, theme “Unearth, Transform, Prosper: Anchoring Economic Transformation through Mining Value Chains”. ZITF Company. https://zitf.co.zw/mine-entra/ and https://miningzimbabwe.com/mine-entra-2026-draws-record-industry-participation-ahead-of-official-opening/
2. Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, community and ASM programming. https://zela.org/
3. Buhera displacement and the Sabi Star mine: “Lithium mining in Zimbabwe: a story of loss for one community”, The Conversation, September 2024, drawing on research at the University of Queensland Sustainable Minerals Institute. https://theconversation.com/lithium-mining-in-zimbabwe-a-story-of-loss-for-one-community-237490
4. “Displaced by the transition: The political ecology of climate change mitigation, displacements and lithium extraction in Zimbabwe”, The Extractive Industries and Society. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214790X24001680
5. Artisanal gold conflict: “The rise of ‘Mashurugwi’ machete gangs and violent conflicts in Zimbabwe’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector”, The Extractive Industries and Society. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214790X20302690
6. Gwanda Community Share Ownership Trust and Blanket Mine dividends. https://miningzimbabwe.com/blanket-mine-delivers-another-us1-8-million-dividend-to-gwanda-community-trust-cementing-a-decade-of-shared-value/ and https://miningzimbabwe.com/blanket-mine-pays-us1-5-million-dividend-to-gwanda-community-trust/ and https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/blanket-mine-pays-gwanda-community-share-ownership-trust-us360k-dividend/
7. Africa Green Minerals Strategy, adopted at the 38th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly, February 2025. African Development Bank briefing note. https://www.afdb.org/en/documents/briefing-note-key-highlights-africa-green-minerals-strategy-2025
8. UNECA SADC critical minerals value chains programme, launched Lusaka, June 2026. https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/un-eca-launches-large-scale-project-to-strengthen-sadc-critical-minerals-value-chains-2026-06-03
9. Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy for South Africa, May 2025. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202505/critical-minerals-and-metals-strategy-south-africa-2025.pdf
10. Mines and Minerals Bill, 2025 (H.B. 1, 2025), gazetted 25 June 2025. Veritas Zimbabwe. https://www.veritaszim.net/node/7495
11. Parliamentary committee stage and requested revisions to the Bill. https://miningzimbabwe.com/mines-and-minerals-bill-clears-major-hurdle-as-committee-demands-final-revisions/
12. EU Critical Raw Materials Act strategic projects and Africa partnerships. https://mine.nridigital.com/mine_feb26/eu-backed_minerals_aeu-backed-mineraprojects_in_africa_move_from_policy_to_proof
13. European Parliament call to suspend the EU-Rwanda minerals partnership, February 2025. https://news.mongabay.com/2025/02/eu-parliament-calls-for-end-to-rwanda-mineral-pact-over-drc-conflict-links/
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15. Gender-based violence in critical mineral mining, including the 15% workforce figure, the 43-company review and the US$20 million per week stoppage cost. IIED Briefing, March 2025. https://www.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2025-03/22610iied.pdf
16. Women’s participation in artisanal and small-scale mining. World Bank Extractives Global Programmatic Support. https://egps.worldbank.org/blog/lets-support-women-artisanal-and-small-scale-mining
17. Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act, 2013, section 13(4). https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/legislation/details/13576