Congo's Quiet Power Shift: Women Move Into the Boardrooms of Mining, Energy and Agriculture

For a country whose economy is built on the ground beneath it — copper and cobalt in the south, hydropower potential running the length of the Congo River, and smallholder farms that feed most of the population — the Democratic Republic of Congo has long been a case study in how little of that wealth has flowed through the hands of women. That is starting to change, unevenly and against a hard backdrop of conflict in the east, but visibly enough that investors, donors and policymakers are paying attention.

The shift is happening against a backdrop set at the very top of government: in 2024, President Félix Tshisekedi named Judith Suminwa Tuluka as the country's first female prime minister, a symbolic marker that has since given cover, if not yet full resourcing, to gender-inclusion pushes lower down in the economy's most consequential sectors. Mining, energy and agriculture together account for the overwhelming share of the DRC's GDP and employment, which is exactly why the leadership gap in each has drawn growing scrutiny — and why the small number of women now breaking into senior roles are being watched as potential proof of concept rather than as isolated stories.

Mining: from the pit to the plenary stage

The DRC produces roughly 70% of the world's mined cobalt and ranks among the top global copper producers, a dominance that has drawn renewed American and Chinese competition for access this year. Yet women remain a small fraction of leadership in an industry still organized, culturally and physically, around a male-dominated workforce. That gap was the explicit subject of this year's DRC Mining Week in Lubumbashi, where organizers added a dedicated Women — Mines and Leadership Forum to the main plenary program rather than leaving it as a side event — a scheduling choice event organizers described as reflecting how central gender inclusion has become to the country's flagship mining gathering. Sessions there focused bluntly on the barrier most often cited by women in the sector: access to finance, which continues to determine who can move from artisanal or wage labor into ownership and operational decision-making.

Bernadette Mpundu-Mpia, Vice-President of the DRC Chamber of Mines for mining entrepreneurship and an advisory board member for DRC Mining Week, has built her career on the less glamorous but foundational work of mining legislation, investment facilitation and strategic partnerships, with a consistent focus on connecting investors, operators and government authorities around local value creation. Her advocacy this year has centered on the same structural problem raised at the forum: that women's underrepresentation in mining leadership is not primarily a pipeline or ambition problem, but a capital-access problem, and that closing it requires deliberate financial and policy mechanisms rather than goodwill alone.

Industry-wide data from neighboring South Africa's mining sector, where women make up only about 15% of the roughly 450,000-strong workforce despite years of formal diversity targets, gives a sense of how slow the baseline pace of change has been across the region — and why DRC advocates are pushing for finance-first interventions rather than repeating targets that have already fallen short elsewhere.

That framing echoes a broader pattern documented by grassroots organizers. Annie Sinanduku Mwange, a Congolese former miner turned union organizer and women's rights activist, has spent over a decade pushing for better conditions and representation for women in artisanal mining communities in Kailo Territory, work that grew out of an early realization that improving women's economic standing was inseparable from reducing child labor in the mines. Her organizing — chronicled in reporting on a network of women in DRC mining sometimes described as the sector's "mother bosses" — points to a leadership pipeline that runs parallel to, and sometimes ahead of, the corporate and governmental one: women building authority informally at the community level long before boardrooms caught up. Notably, the state miner Gécamines itself underwent a full leadership reshuffle this year, with President Tshisekedi installing a new chairman and chief executive amid US minerals-deal negotiations — a reminder that even as advocacy for women's inclusion accelerates, the commanding heights of DRC's mining institutions remain, for now, occupied almost entirely by men.

Energy: rebuilding a grid, and deciding who it reaches

Only around one in ten Congolese has reliable access to electricity, even though the Congo River alone holds technically exploitable hydropower potential estimated at over 770,000 gigawatt-hours a year — a paradox that has made the energy sector one of the most closely watched frontiers for reform. Two women have become prominent voices in that push, from very different vantage points. Dr. Sandrine Mubenga has been a visible advocate at the country's electricity regulator, ARE, for streamlined licensing and stronger public-private partnerships as the real unlock for investment, rather than subsidy alone. Under a revised electricity law, the regulator has already begun issuing single licenses that let one operator handle generation, distribution and transmission together — a simplification credited with drawing new solar and mini-grid projects, including a 200-megawatt solar plant expected to create close to 300 jobs, and a multibillion-dollar framework agreement to accelerate mini-grid deployment tied to the country's critical-minerals investment corridor.

Separately, Lyza O. Shodu leads the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet's DRC country program, bringing 18 years of experience across renewable energy, private-sector development and gender equality, including earlier work managing the country's Mwinda electrification fund. With more than 74 million Congolese still living without power, her team's plan to deploy solar mini-grids across roughly 100 urban and peri-urban areas by 2040 is explicitly built around an equity mandate: ensuring the energy transition reaches women, youth and marginalized communities directly, rather than assuming benefits will trickle down from large industrial and mining-linked power projects, as has often been the pattern with DRC infrastructure investment historically.

Agriculture: the majority workforce, still a minority in management

Agriculture is where the gender gap is starkest relative to women's actual economic footprint. Women make up 57% of the DRC's agricultural workforce, according to World Bank research, yet they remain a small minority in management and policymaking roles across the sector — a mismatch that keeps women's priorities underrepresented in decisions about credit, land tenure and which crops get investment. The same World Bank analysis found that women's lower involvement in higher-value cash crops such as palm oil, coffee, cocoa and rubber, rather than any gap in effort or knowledge, is the primary driver of their lower recorded agricultural productivity — a finding that shifts the policy conversation away from training programs and toward access to land, capital and markets for cash-crop production.

Some of the most interesting recent leadership on this front is emerging from agribusiness innovation rather than from government office. Joëlla Buhendwa, founder and CEO of AstiFerme in Bukavu, was recognized this year in an international agriculture award for building a circular-economy model that converts household organic waste into animal feed and fertilizer through black soldier fly farming — an approach designed to cut reliance on imported protein, reduce pollution and create green jobs for young people and marginalized groups in eastern Congo, a region where formal employment options remain scarce.

In North Kivu, where conflict has repeatedly displaced farming families and disrupted markets, an initiative called Beans for Women Empowerment has paired the distribution of certified bean seed with training in leadership, economic empowerment and decision-making for women farmers in the territory of Masisi. Run in partnership with the Pan Africa Bean Research Alliance, the project reflects a recognition among aid organizations that, in crisis zones where gender-based violence often intensifies, restoring women's economic footing and building their capacity to lead are treated as inseparable goals rather than sequential ones. Training is delivered on-site where security conditions allow and remotely in higher-risk areas, an operational compromise that itself illustrates how much leadership development in eastern Congo's agricultural sector has to be built around conflict logistics rather than around it.

An uneven but consistent pattern

None of this amounts to parity yet, and in every sector the numbers still tell a story of underrepresentation at the top even where women dominate the workforce below it. But the pattern across mining, energy and agriculture is consistent: where women have moved into leadership or advocacy roles this year, it has tracked closely with efforts to formalize informal sectors, diversify investment beyond a handful of dominant state and foreign players, and extend infrastructure, credit and market access into communities that large-scale extraction and agribusiness projects have historically bypassed. For a country trying to convert mineral wealth, hydropower potential and agricultural capacity into broader development — and doing so while managing an active security crisis in its east — that alignment between inclusion and diversification may prove more consequential to the DRC's economic trajectory than any single high-profile appointment.