Supporting Indigenous Women’s Participation: ASI’s Commitment to Meaningful Engagement

27 March 2025

Indigenous women play numerous vital roles within both their communities and wider society. They are often keepers and sharers of traditional knowledge, sharing information with younger generations such as spiritual teachings, oral histories, medicinal knowledge and traditional arts. These women also have important roles as environmental stewards, caring for their traditional lands, practicing sustainable agriculture and protecting nature, as well as being caregivers of their communities and families through. They contribute to livelihoods, sustaining their local economy, acting as providers through gathering and selling agricultural products and artisan crafts. And lastly, women often have the role of leaders and peacemakers within their communities, supporting vulnerable people such as children and elderly, resolving conflict and advocating for their rights as human rights defenders.

Barriers hinder meaningful engagement

Indigenous women are not a homogenous group, with many different groups representing distinct cultures and histories. However, they often share common challenges with multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination due to gender, Indigenous identity and socio-economic status. These challenges are exacerbated by many factors including losing access to their territories due to natural resources being granted to external actors by government. Despite their wealth of knowledge and unique perspectives, Indigenous women are often neither meaningfully engaged nor consulted, and have limited participation in decision-making processes that affect them directly. Barriers to participation are often systemic involving:

• A lack of representation in political structures,
• limited access to information,
• legal gaps which result in poor protections,
• economic barriers such as limited employment opportunities and reliance on the informal economy,
• social and cultural barriers including gender-based violence and the burden of traditional gender roles,
• educational and health barriers due to limited access and poor quality as well as
• insecurity from development activities that can result in displacement and general instability.

Indigenous women have important, unique perspectives, as well as specific needs and risks that should be considered in all levels of decision-making. They should have equal and real opportunities to influence decisions, strategies and policies.

Overcoming barriers to meaningful engagement

Ensuring women are engaged is essential to upholding their human rights, as well as being integral to securing the rights of Indigenous peoples as a whole. However, engagement must be meaningful for a real and representative outcome. This means engaging with a diverse group, where those participating can provide genuine opinions without coercion or fear of reprisal, and contribute to decisions where their inputs are valued and accepted. This also requires addressing the unequal barriers mentioned above to ensure that they are able to make informed contributions. Potential ways to address these barriers include providing additional education, making information more accessible, addressing economic barriers to participation by providing funding and mitigating gender-related risks. At a higher level, advocating for women’s meaningful participation means upholding all their human rights, for example by implementing a Free, Prior and Informed Consent process, promoting Indigenous women on governance committees and having effective grievance mechanisms.

How ASI engages with Indigenous women

ASI engages with Indigenous women in multiple ways to actively integrate their diverse perspectives into all areas of our work and decision-making processes. One way we do this is through the Standards Committee, a crucial ASI governance and decision-making body. Representation of Indigenous women on the Standards Committee helps to promote their perspectives within the criteria of the Performance Standard. Currently, the Standards Committee has one Indigenous woman as a full representative. Two additional Indigenous women act as IPAF observers, with a view to them becoming full representatives in the near future.

Capacity-building engagements such as the information sessions that are integrated within the standards committee processes are critical to meaningful participation and enable womens’ contributions to be informed by, and fully considered in, ASI’s Standards development processes.

Finally, Indigenous women are also engaged through the Indigenous Peoples Advisory Forum (IPAF), where a greater number of women are able to participate and share their inputs, which also feed into ASI decision-making processes. In support of capacity building the concept for Australia based information workshops were developed with Indigenous women taking a lead role. The workshop materials include the process, decision making pathways and technical methods for both bauxite exploration and bauxite mining. Indigenous women then took a lead role in roll out of the workshops in remote areas of northern Australia impacted by bauxite developments. This successful program was then adapted to suit the bauxite development process in the west African context, in Guinea. The Guinea workshops adopted a train the trainer approach for further development of the information materials and the successful roll out of workshops during which women played a lead role.

Moving forward

Increasing opportunities for Indigenous women to meaningfully engage with ASI is an ongoing focus of our work includes active participation in IPAF. The IPAF ensures that all voices are heard and the engagement process includes a safe, collegiate environment in which everyone can have their say. When undertaking project work with ASI, community engagement, and broader capacity building for auditors, registered specialists and other stakeholders ASI advice always highlights the importance of being inclusive and with particular emphasis on gender balance.

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