![]() ![]() "When the Chinese come and say 'we are going to build', this is a big investment. This alternative, such as a national buyer, would pay vulnerable miners more in return for putting up fences and installing security guards to keep children out of sites as well as banning deep tunnels and providing protective equipment…"When you guys are coming with a pilot project, it's just a drop in the ocean," says Paul Mabiola Yenga, adviser to the DRC Ministry of Mines. Men can earn upwards of $400 a month digging for cobalt compared with $100 a month for a teacher…"To address artisanal mining, a number of factors need to be considered, including root causes, livelihood development and improved co-ordination of support and development efforts,"… What needs to be done to formalise artisanal mining is clear: offer an alternative trading structure to break the dominance of an exploitative network of intermediaries. They are also introducing due diligence and human rights legislation in the global supply chain…Governments and multinational corporations are under increasing pressure to do more to improve safety at informal mines and find a way to incorporate them into ethical supply chains… It also threatens to grant China, which has looser human-rights standards than western rivals, the upper hand in securing critical minerals, while keeping the populations of resource-rich nations hostage to kleptocrats and international criminal gangs…Plus, the incentives to mine are high. Yet this small-scale mining generates about 15 to 30 per cent of the DRC's cobalt supply, which in turn produces about 70 per cent of global output…If the world is to meet its need for cobalt - and do so in a sustainable and equitable way - then the artisanal mining sector will have to be cleaned up to meet international standards…Washington and Brussels have become more serious about bolstering the security of raw material supply - and loosening China's stranglehold on critical mineral supply chains. The practice is known as "artisanal" mining a name that belies its rudimentary and hazardous nature. Now 30, a teacher and interpreter, Asamoah says he is one of the lucky few in the surreal, almost otherworldly, reddish-brown landscapes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's copper and cobalt capital Kolwezi, in the south of the country… Asamoah's story encapsulates the uneasy coexistence of the two faces of the DRC's cobalt industry: on one side, the industrial mines run by multinationals like Glencore that are sealed off by concrete walls and wire fences and, on the other, the informal mines with hellish, unsafe conditions that feed underground Chinese trading networks. ![]() "I was bound and obliged as I had no options," Asamoah says, shuffling three mobile phones powered by the very material responsible for both the death of some of his closest friends and his escape from poverty. From as young as 14 years old, he went down narrow holes as deep as 25 metres, carried 50kg bags and washed ore to produce the cobalt essential to the batteries used in the world's laptops, phones and electric cars. ĭressed in double denim, thick-rimmed black glasses and shiny leather boots, Mujinga Tshikuta Asamoah bears few signs of the hardship he endured as a child. Dressed in double denim, thick-rimmed black glasses and shiny leather boots, Mujinga Tshikuta Asamoah bears few signs of the hardship he. ![]()
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