Ugandan women enfeebled as EACOP crude pipeline upends their lives

The construction of the massive East African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) that will cross Uganda and Tanzania has served to highlight the vulnerabilities of women to fossil fuel development, in spite of the female empowerment claims made by the oil and gas firms themselves, new research reveals.

The giant crude project — which will include the world’s longest heated oil pipeline (EACOP), two other pipelines, more than 400 drilling sites, two oil processing facilities, an oil refinery, and an airport — is being carried out by an alliance led by French oil major TotalEnergies and China’s state-run oil firm CNOOC, who claim to have taken the needs of local communities into account.

Yet new in-the-field research carried out into the experience of women impacted by the pipeline paints a very different picture.

A report published this month, based on a two-month long investigation into the living conditions of women displaced by the project, says that all the women it spoke to said they had little access to the cash compensation they received for displacement.

This was because the EACOP alliance opened joint bank accounts for husbands and wives, meaning women did not have sole access to it, said the report, carried out by the Multinationals Observatory, a Paris-based corporate watchdog, in partnership with the Tasha Research Institute, a Ugandan NGO.

In some cases, bank offices where the cash compensation was deposited were located too far for women to access them by foot, so only their husband could reach them by motorbike, the research revealed.

It is estimated that around 118,000 people have been displaced by the EACOP alone, a 1,443 km pipeline that will transfer crude oil from the Lake Albert basin in Uganda to oil facilities near Tanga port, in Tanzania, for export.

Oxfam had already warned about the potential risks to EACOP’s compensation process reaching women in a gender analysis of the project’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessments, published back in 2020.

This phenomenon — of the money from extractives flowing predominantly to male household members — has been reported elsewhere, including by the World Bank in Papua New Guinea, and by UN Women in other parts of Asia Pacific.

Yet the alliance carrying out the EACOP development, comprising the Ugandan and Tanzanian governments as well as Total and CNOOC, has claimed that the oil project will help to close the “gender gap” in displaced communities, and to empower women.

Meanwhile, for those Ugandan families who chose a “land-for-land” exchange in place of cash compensation, women also reported experiencing a dive in their quality of life and/or disruption to their usual social customs. Many were left with inadequate or even worse housing. Common complaints were a lack of outdoor cooking space, and excessively long distances (in some cases, a 20km walk) to their new farmland, the Multinationals Observatory research found.

Women also reported lower quality of land compared to what they had previously owned, compromising their ability to grow mangoes and other fruit for their family to consume, or crops to sell at markets and gain a livelihood. In some cases, women spoke of new farmland being polluted by nearby oil development, making the soil practically unusable.

Finally, given the caregiving role that is still central to the lives of women in rural Uganda, a drop in food available for the family has resulted in some cases in an uptick in tensions and conflicts in the household, the new research found. In Uganda — a country which already has elevated levels of gender-based violence — the risk of increased domestic tensions is a deeply unwelcome development.

Uganda’s first-ever stand-alone National Survey on Violence against Women and Girls found in 2020 that, shockingly, almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence — or both — by partners, or non-partners, since the age of 15. The world reeled with shock and disgust last September on the news of the brutal murder of Ugandan Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei, whose former boyfriend doused her in petrol and set her ablaze.

Global extractive industry projects are also known to represent risks for women’s safety. So-called “man camps”, as in temporary settlements for workers on oil and gas fields and other fossil fuel infrastructure, allegedly lead to increased cases of sexual assault, harassment, human trafficking and other violent crimes against women, in the U.S. and Canada, in particular.

Ugandan women expressed fear and frustration over the presence of new male oil workers, that included road workers, oil workers, military representatives and others, which they described as an “unidentifiable group of male foreigners restricting their movements,” the Multinationals Observatory research noted.