04 — The workforce
The women
Approximately thirty women are associated with the enterprise. The active count is not yet verified from records. Both of those sentences are the position, and neither is a placeholder for a better one.
What we can say
Approximately thirty women are associated with Nyamira Young Women Miners Enterprises. They recover material, screen it, assess it and bag it, at sites in the Kisii–Nyamira belt.
We do not describe them as employees. A business name registered under Cap 499 has no legal personality separate from its proprietor, and association is not employment. Using the wrong word here would misdescribe both the legal position and the arrangement itself.
We do not publish a jobs figure, an income figure, or a number of households supported. We have not measured any of them.
What we cannot yet say
We cannot verify, to a standard we would be willing to defend, how many women were active in any given month. There is no membership register recording identity, association and activity by period, which is precisely the kind of record this enterprise argues is the thing that creates value. We are not exempt from our own argument.
That gap is listed, with the work that would close it, on what we cannot yet show.
Why this page makes no claims about individuals
There are no profiles here, no testimonials, and no composite accounts of a representative member.
The reason is that we cannot publish claims about a named woman’s earnings, hours or circumstances without her account of them and her agreement to their publication, and we do not have either. A constructed story, however sympathetic, would be an invention placed in a real person’s life, on a site whose entire proposition is that it does not invent.
Where a woman’s experience is described here in future, it will be because she described it herself.
What the work actually is
Recovery is manual and physical. Material is selected from a stockpile, lifted, filled into sacks, tied and moved, over ground that is steep and for much of the year wet. Screening is done with hand sieves. Assessment is done by eye and by hand, by people who have handled material from the same formations for years.
The last of those is worth stating plainly, because it is usually left out. Grading is the highest-judgement step in the line. It depends on knowing the local material, that knowledge does not travel, and it is held by the women doing the work rather than by anyone advising them. It is the strongest reason for the graded step to stay in the county rather than for sacks to leave raw and the value to accumulate somewhere else.
What formalisation changes, and what it costs
Payment against a recorded weight and grade replaces a negotiation at the roadside over a sack nobody has weighed. Work becomes attributable, so consistency accumulates to the woman who produced it. A record exists that she recovered material, which is the raw material of everything that ordinarily requires a history.
It also costs something. Capture takes minutes at the scale that were not previously spent. Settlement has to be prompt or it is worse than what it replaced. A record of a woman’s work exists and is readable by others, and she is entitled to know who can see it and why.
Formalisation: what changes for one woman sets out both halves.
Training
Reboot Republic is the enterprise’s training partner. We are not describing training as delivered, because we are not in a position to state that a cohort has completed one.
Visual documentation is by Makairo Studios, Nyamira, which produced every illustrative visualisation on this site.
Neither is a co-applicant or a co-owner of the enterprise.