Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

As scrutiny over the conditions under which cobalt is mined has increased, stakeholders have formulated international coalitions to help ensure that their supply chains are clean. The two leading coalitions are the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA). The RMI promotes the responsible sourcing of minerals in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. Part of the RMI’s platform includes a Responsible Minerals Assurance Process that purports to support independent, third-party assessments of cobalt supply chains and to monitor cobalt mining sites in the DRC for child labor. The GBA promotes safe working conditions in the mining of raw materials for rechargeable batteries. The GBA has developed a Cobalt Action Partnership to “immediately and urgently eliminate child and forced labour from the cobalt value chain”2 through on-ground monitoring and third-party assessments. In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.