The Congo’s “cobalt rush” has continued to fuel fears of human rights violations and child labor for decades now, and the race to secure the valuable natural resource has pitted major tech companies against one another.
In the summer of 2014, a Congolese man dug into the backyard of his home on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC.) The man, who later told neighbors and reporters that he had originally intended to simply create a pit for a new toilet, hit what had looked like turquoise rocks about eight feet into the soil.
It was later identified that he had punctuated a slab of heterogenite, a rare mineral which can be refined into cobalt. This was the beginning of the Congo’s “cobalt rush,” which continues to prosper to date.
For more than a decade, the global digital revolution has been enabled by places like Kolwezi, as cobalt is an essential mineral used to make lithium-ion batteries found in cell phones, computers, and electric cars.
As the demand for these technologies – especially electric cars in Europe – increases, so does the demand for cobalt. According to projections from the World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance, the demand for this mineral for use in lithium-ion batteries will grow significantly by 2030 as a result of the electric vehicle boom.
Southern Congo sits atop of an estimated 3.5 million metric tons of cobalt – almost half of the world’s known supply, and in recent decades, hundreds of thousands of Congolese men, women, and children have moved to the formerly remote and isolated area to search for new job opportunities. With now more than half a million residents, Kolwezi has seen an influx of new residents as many people have taken jobs at industrial mines in this region in the past decade.
More than 70% of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and although the majority of Congo’s cobalt comes from large mining sites where rock is dug up by trucks and other machinery, a growing proportion is coming from “artisanal” miners who dig by hand or with basic equipment.
This small-scale mining is completely unregulated. According to Gecamines, Congo’s state-owned miner, artisanal mining accounts for an estimated 30% of the Congo’s refined cobalt.
Labor-intensive along with informal training, artisanal mining has proved to come with major human rights risks, including: extremely dangerous working conditions, and child labor. Fatal accidents in unsafe tunnels occur frequently, and there have been detailed reports, such as the one byAmnesty International that has outlined the prevalence of child labor in these mining operations.
Mining operations around the world have raised various red flags for human rights groups that have documented severe human rights issues. These risks, however, have been particularly high for mining operations conducted in the DRC – a country consumed with ethnic conflict, weakened by Ebola and other life-threatening diseases, and constantly at risk by high levels of governmental and social corruption.
In 2019, some of the world’s largest tech companies, including: Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and Tesla were named in a lawsuit brought into a Washington, D.C. court by 13 Congolese families. The lawsuit alleges that their children were killed or injured while mining for the DRC.
According to Forbes, the lawsuit alleges that “the children mining Defendants’ cobalt is not merely being forced to work full-time, extremely dangerous mining jobs at the expense of their educations and futures; they are being regularly maimed and killed by tunnel collapses and other known hazards common to cobalt mining in the DRC.”
These national, multi-billion dollar corporations are alleged to have been aiding and abetting in the deaths and injuries of the children working in cobalt mines, and that the companies are knowingly benefiting and providing support to artisanal mining in the DRC and that the mining business is dependent upon children, with males performing the most dangerous work in the mines, such as tunnel digging.
This lawsuit is a landmark for several reasons, since up until 2019, no tech company had faced any lawsuit of this kind, even though cobalt mining and extraction has been linked to violations of human rights for decades. Like those identified in this lawsuit, tech companies have a responsibility to protect, respect, and uphold human rights wherever they operate in the world. These companies must step up their efforts to ensure that their operations are conducted following the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and must be transparent in the process. If human rights violations are identified, such abuses must be immediately stopped and measures must be implemented with a sense of urgency.
Putting pressure on similar corporations, international human rights organizations have flagged these human rights abuses. As a response to these pressures, some tech companies have decided not to source cobalt from the DRC. Whether these companies do so for the right reason or just to avoid tainting their brand’s image, is another question. Regardless of their intentions though, this won’t work for long, as no other country in the world has been able to meet the increasing demand for cobalt. The production of other cobalt-exporting countries, including: Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and Russia accounts for less than 5% of the global production.
Shutting down operations that include artisanal mining, however, is not as easy as it may seem, since it has employed more than two million Congolese miners who depend on this job and income to provide for themselves and their family members. Not only have these jobs become a lifeline for Congolese who live in extreme poverty but cutting artisanal mining out of the cobalt supply chain is not feasible, as it is so interwoven.
Many companies have started to experiment with so-called ASM (artisanal mining) formalization projects, which are meant to regulate mining operations and working conditions, but companies need to further work with key stakeholders to establish a common standard for mine safety and child labor, to ensure that artisanal mining for cobalt in the Congo is sourced responsibly, and in a way that has the workers’ best interests in mind rather than their own.
