NEWSBYLAURA HEATON

It began with individuals, spread to campuses, was taken up by cities, and last Friday California became the very first U.S. state to take action on conflict minerals from Congo.

By a vote of 67 to 11, the California state assembly passed a bill that prohibits state agencies from signing contracts with companies that fail to comply with federal regulations aimed at deterring business with armed groups in eastern Congo. The California bill builds off the momentum of the Dodd-Frank bill passed by the U.S. Congress last year, by further incentivizing companies to help build a legitimate mining industry in Congo.

While Congo’s corrupt mining industry isn’t the source of the country’s decade-long conflict in the east, militias and even soldiers in the national army exploit its mineral wealth to fund the war they are largely waging against civilians. Those minerals end up in electronics. As the major success in California demonstrates, a growing number of U.S. consumers are mobilizing to demand reforms that would ultimately enable Congolese to benefit from their mineral resources – not continue to see them as a curse.

It’s certainly a belated realization, but the war in eastern Congo – broiling for well over a decade – is no longer hidden or ignored. Encouragingly, with this heightened public awareness has come not apathy rooted in the complexity or magnitude of the conflict, but rather a dedication to proactively confront the dynamics that even people far removed from Congo can influence.

As with other social movements, students have led the way. Across the United States, student leaders are stirring up interest on campuses, collecting pages of signatures, and petitioning their administrators and trustees to enact policies committing endowments and procurement plans to “conflict-free” investments and purchases. Attention from Congress and from celebrity activists to the connection between the conflict and the purchases of minerals from mines controlled by armed groups has provided tangible action to rally around and the necessary spotlight.

This Mother’s Day, Academy Award winning actor and self-proclaimed “mama’s boy” Javier Bardem used his star-power by sitting down the Enough Project's co-founder, John Prendergast, to draw attention to the threats women face in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ranked as one of the 10 worst places in the world to be a mother.

Awareness about the link between eastern Congo’s decade-long war, consumer electronics, and the trade in conflict minerals is growing. Perhaps most significantly, the conflict minerals provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed last year in no small part thanks to the efforts of activists, who pushed a notable shift in how people in Africa’s Great Lakes region perceived public concern over Congo’s minerals.

“[At first] we didn’t take this legislation seriously, and we thought there would be a compromise,” a mining executive said recently (i.e. ‘we thought we’d be off the hook’).

If you knew your family savings or retirement funds were financing a government’s genocidal campaign, would you keep sending money?

JPMorgan Chase is faced with this question right now.

Next month, JPMorgan Chase’s shareholders will decide whether they want the company to adopt a genocide free investing policy and avoid investing in companies that “substantially contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity, the most egregious violations of human rights.”

So far, the financial services firm has been defensive, filing a “no action” request to the Securities and Exchange Commission in a bid to avoid putting a potential genocide-free policy to a vote. The SEC denied the request.

As the frenetic excitement about southern Sudan's recent referendum wears off, the challenges of building up a new country from scratch loom. For some segments of southern Sudan’s society, the obstacles are even greater.

“The women of southern Sudan are ‘the marginalized of the marginalized,’ as Dr. John Garang used to say,” said Anyieth D’Awol, quoting the late rebel leader who saw many of the problems in Sudan originating from the Khartoum government’s negligence. As one stark example, literacy in southern Sudan stands at 24 percent, but only 12 percent of women can read and write.

Anyieth is southern Sudanese, but she first visited the South when she was 27. She studied human rights in the UK and has a law degree, fields she pursued because “I never thought I would stay in England. Always knew I wanted to come back to Sudan.”

“I don’t have a war story,” she said, in a tone that almost sounded like she was apologizing.

Looking for a memorable message for family and friends when it’s your turn to share over Thanksgiving weekend? How’s this?

"This Black Friday I am remembering the connection between my electronics and the conflict in eastern Congo."

By chance, this year Thanksgiving falls on International Day to End Violence Against Women. Since the holiday also marks the beginning of the biggest shopping season of the year, the Enough Project’s Raise Hope for Congo campaign is working to raise awareness in the US about the links between electronics purchases and the conflict in eastern Congo, the world's deadliest war which is characterized by widespread sexual violence and the use of rape as a weapon of war.

While people are out shopping for the best deals on new computers, MP3 players and cameras, the campaign is asking people to be responsible consumers and help spread the word about the conflict in Congo - not by boycotting products but by using their electronics to tweet and join a Facebook awareness campaign to build the conflict-free consumer movement.

Kakuma, Kenya - Seven Sudanese refugees sit in a circle in a bright room at a former health clinic filling out mock voter registration cards, practicing inking each others' fingers, interviewing one another and roll-playing how to respond to questions community members may have.

For the first time in their lives, 22,000 refugees are about to vote, and these seven will take them through the process.

This week registration booths opened to start collecting the names of eligible voters for a historic referendum on independence for South Sudan scheduled for January 9. As fingerprinted voter cards were issued, there were reports of jubilant scenes unfolding throughout the South.

But will the South Sudan referendum actually take place on January 9?

This is the question on the minds of activists, journalists and analysts covering Sudan. Sudanese officials pledge to not delay, but with less than two months to go, the outstanding logistical and political challenges are significant.

The world has come to expect seeing U.S. college students on the frontlines of progressive movements over the last 50 years. From the 1960s anti-war movement, to anti-Apartheid organizing throughout the 1980s, to Darfur advocacy, students have mobilized the young masses on issues that other segments of the public view as obscure.

The latest wave of student activism, focusing on ending the trade in Congolese conflict minerals, is no less impressive.

Nearly 30 American schools have taken up the mantle of the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative, coordinated by STAND and The Enough Project’s RAISE Hope for Congo campaign. The initiative aims to pressure electronics companies to take responsibility for the minerals in their supply chain, so that other reforms necessary for ending the conflict can take hold. An online toolkit helps groups get started, but from campus to campus, the actions reflect the creativity of student leaders as well as the constraints they encounter dealing with administrators or trustees.

Students at Stanford University made unprecedented strides earlier this year when they convinced the Board of Trustees to support any shareholder resolution calling on a company Stanford invests in to trace its mineral supply chain. The move made Stanford the first university to adopt a policy on conflict minerals from Congo.

Nairobi, Kenya - Last week two girls, aged 14 and 18, were shot in a public execution in Somalia after the extremist Al Shabaab Islamic movement accused them of being spies.

But as the news broke, a group of Somali women were meeting in Nairobi to discuss their role in bringing peace to the war-torn country.

“You have been living among beasts,” said a Somali woman who had traveled from Canada to attend the meeting, addressing those women who have remained in Somalia despite the risks. “You are the vehicle and machine for moving to peace in Somalia.”

The Somali Women’s Agenda (SWA) represents nearly 200,000 women in Somalia and the diaspora. A core group meets regularly, traveling from North America and Europe to join members living in east Africa.

The SWA must tread carefully around Somali political issues to protect its members. Even some of the most vocal members shied away from the few photographers circulating at the meeting, and asked that their names not be mentioned. As a group, the SWA doesn’t engage with Al Shabaab or other extremist groups, but the women spoke often of the unique advantage of being able to reach out to ideologues and perpetrators of violence through their roles as mothers and wives.

One woman told of a recent incident in which Al Shabaab abducted a nurse who worked at Mogadishu’s main hospital. The woman telling the story was known as a local advocate and called to come negotiate the nurse’s release. Al Shabaab obliged her request to release the nurse, she said, because they knew of her influence in the community.

Nairobi, Kenya - One wouldn’t think that a 22-year-old Central African insurgency, notorious for mutilations, child abductions and sexual slavery, would make good fodder for comedy.

But Jane Bussmann's book The Worst Date Ever, featuring a cover photo of a scantily-clad dyed-blond, gives a refreshing new spin on Africa’s longest-running war and some of the factors that perpetuate it.

Bussmann’s quest to join the ranks of what she calls 'The Useful People' began when she left the world of celebrity journalism in Hollywood to Uganda, first as a teacher then as an aspiring foreign correspondent.

She would frequent the Acholi Inn, the nicest hotel in northern Uganda, for interviews.

“Apparently you had to work for a charity to afford to stay there,” she tells a Nairobi audience here for a comedy show rendition of her book. The Acholi, she says, was “full of Westerners come to save the children."