Digging for Change
Selected Findings and Analysis from a Review of the State of ASM cobalt Mining Working Conditions, Children’s Rights, and Economic Opportunity in Two Cobalt Mining Communities in Lualaba Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Commissioned by smartphone brand Fairphone, lighting company Signify and the international cobalt refiner Huayou Cobalt (parent company of Congolese subsidiary: Congo Dongfang International Mining [CDM]), and made possible with a grant from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), a multidisciplinary team of experts from The Impact Facility for Sustainable Mining Communities carried out research in March 2019 in the mining zones of Lualaba Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to review and assess the working conditions at the Kasulu and Kamilombe artisanal cobalt mining sites, the state of children’s rights in the associated mining communities, and the livelihood activities and opportunities in the local economy
The purpose of the project was to gather information on and gain insight into the situation in the cobalt mining communities in the region to inform the programme design for a multi-year effort to systemically address environmental, social and governance–related challenges associated with artisanal cobalt production, as well as community-wide efforts to support child labour remediation and mitigation. This programme forms a central part of a supply chain–wide call to action — the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA). FCA is a bold attempt to broaden industry acceptance and support for responsible artisanal mining (ASM) of cobalt by starting an inclusive action platform, inviting companies, large and small, up and down the supply chain to do their part to make Fair Cobalt the default, not the exception. An overview of FCA is provided in section three of this report.
While it was not the aim of this project to publish and broadcast a research report or white paper on the artisanal cobalt mining in Lualaba, the research team and the sponsoring consortium decided to make public a summary of the more detailed 100+- page assessment as a response to requests by many industry actors for a more up-to-date situational analysis. It is also hoped that by so doing further need for resources being spent unnecessarily on fact-finding missions can be avoided and instead be allocated to programmes to foster direct action on the ground. While attempting to paint a holistic picture, this report should be understood as a qualitative assessment of a wide range of often complex challenges. It should be noted too that the project was limited in scope and that this published report selects and distils some of its findings, but not all. There are a some topics associated with artisanal cobalt mining in the Lualaba Province of the DRC that have been covered in other public reports and newspaper articles in recent years that are not covered in this document, such as resettlement of communities to make way for mining, the practices at and flow of material to and from so called ‘open markets’ in and around Kolwezi, and the correlation between illnesses associated with radiation and cobalt mining. These are important topics and deserve to be given the appropriate depth of research, analysis and discussion that the research team felt it was not able to provide here in this shottened presentation of the project’s research results.
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Additional Info
- Author(s)
- A Carter, D Sturmes
- Publication Year
- 2020
- Language
- English
- Publishing Institution Webpage
- https://impactfacility.com/blog/digging-for-change/
- Data Source Classification
- Other
- Research Type
- Both
- Research Methodology
- Primary - INTERVIEW, Primary - OBSERVATION, Primary - SURVEY, Secondary - PREVIOUS RESEARCH, Secondary - OFFICIAL STATISTICS, Primary - ANECDOTAL
- Thematic Tags
- Political, Due Diligence, Traceability, and Transparency, Formalization, Supply Chains, Economic, Access to Markets, Income, Market Linkages, Social, Child Labor, Health and Safety, Labor and Working Conditions, Livelihoods, Legal, Licensing, Environmental
- Minerals
- Cobalt
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Country
- Democratic Republic of Congo
- Last Updated
- July 14, 2020