Desenvolvimento Comunitário

“The challenge is to not only build the skills but also facilitate the growth of other activities in parallel to mining […] Mining companies can localize some of their products and service procurement policies to help build local supply capabilities […] In addition to helping train local community members to provide goods and services, companies can also consider supporting micro credit schemes to help encourage small business.”

According to my interpretation of it, the document recommends that mining companies look at building the capacity of the communities to survive long after the mine has gone. A parallel economy has to emerge that may be based, initially, on providing goods and services to the mine but that, eventually, would expand and diversify to provide the same to the community, the region and the State.

The Toolkit even mentions, by name, an enterprise that did precisely that:

“…The Lac La Ronge Indian Band initially developed trucking and catering skills with support from the local uranium mines in northern Canada. Over time, it expanded its business away from the mines and had an annual turnover of CD $65 million in 2005 supplying services in the surrounding region.”

Wrong Tools for the Job

The Toolkit’s excellence, in both identifying “what not to do” and in suggesting “what to do” was lost, in my view, when it started to suggest and enumerate the tools to achieve what it had so eloquently suggested.

The “17 Tools” proposed are all “top down.” Some of them may be useful in identifying what areas of trade and apprenticeship can be offered to residents but, in our experience, they are useless in fostering entrepreneurship. “Facilitating the growth of other activities in parallel to mining” requires “facilitation tools” and “facilitation tools” have to be, by definition, bottom-up and responsive.

Working with entrepreneurs, how- ever, entails an environment that allows local people to come and tell us what they want to do, when they want to do it and how. It requires the creation of a “convivial” social infrastructure in the community that allows for free, confidential, caring, competent and compassionate service to them.

Facilitating Entrepreneurship

The change that is required to go from “planning for infrastructure development” to “facilitating local entrepreneurship” is huge. It is like going from open cut low grade coal mining to prospecting for gold nuggets. Not only are the tools different; everything is different, including the attitude and expectations of the people involved.

We, at the Sirolli Institute, know how to prospect for gold. We know how to find one nugget at a time and have developed a methodology that actually gets the nuggets to come to us.

In 1985 we implemented the first Enterprise Facilitation project in Esperance, Western Australia. Since then, we have been refining the process and have been developing tools for sustainable community development that are ideally suited for capturing the passion, energy and imagination of local potential entrepreneurs.

We never initiate contact with local entrepreneurs or motivate local people to do anything. If invited to work in a mining community, we mainly engage with the mining company management and train a small team in the principles and practices of Enterprise Facilitation.

We then assist that team (called the Project Management Team) to recruit an Enterprise Facilitator, from within or outside the company. The Enterprise Facilitator is preferably a native of the country and is both culturally and linguistically suited to operate in the community.

The Enterprise Facilitator, whose selection is based on certain personal- ity characteristics and life experiences, is then trained by us to respond to local would-be entrepreneurs and to facilitate the transformation of their ideas into sustainable enterprises.

While working with mining companies we have noticed that the language and thinking behind community development have changed dramatically. It is the tools that have to catch up.

Some of the ICMM tools were borrowed from international development agencies and non-government organizations that have been working in Africa for the past four decades.

Yet, after forty years of international aid and US$ 2 trillion donated to the African continent, Africa is poorer now than forty years ago. Not only that, the gap between the African countries and the rest of the world has actually widened during the period.

The rhetoric in international development circles is becoming even more re- fined and the names involved even more impressive, but what has been done is more of the same. More money has been allocated to build hospitals, schools, water treatment and roads for communities that cannot maintain them.

The mining industry can do better than that.

Dr. Ernesto Sirolli is the founder of the Sirolli Institute. 

Download as PDF: Mining Community Development, From Rhetoric to Practice