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

by Siddharth Kara

I came across several young women dressed in sarongs and T-shirts, standing in shallow pits with about six inches of coppery water at the bottom. They were not kin to each other but worked in a group to keep safe. Sexual assault by male artisanal miners, négociants, and soldiers was common in mining areas. The women said they all knew someone who had been shoved into a pit and attacked, the likely cause of at least some of the babies strapped to teenage backs. Sexual assault was a scourge in almost every artisanal mining area I visited.

At the end of the day, the women helped each other to haul their fifty-kilogram sacks about a kilometer to the front of the site where négociants purchased each from them for around $0.80.

They tried to have children, but she miscarried twice. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”

women were always paid less than men for the same sack of cobalt.

the only women you will see selling the cobalt are the ones who work on their own,”

what would happen if an artisanal miner were to fill the bottom half of a sack with dirt and the...

“The négociants will find out at the depot. They will bring a gang to attack the creuseurs. No one would ever buy...

A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.

The depots were the unremarkable yet vital junctions between the informal and formal cobalt supply chains. Most of the depots for cobalt from Kipushi, as well as the smaller artisanal sites in nearby forests, were located on “heavy-charge road.” They consisted of wooden shacks with large pink tarpaulins draped across the front. The names of the depots were painted in black letters atop the tarps—

The prices per kilogram that the depots offered for heterogenite were posted at the front, written in black marker on flattened raffia sacks based on cobalt concentrations from 0.5 percent to 2 percent in increments of one-tenth of a percent.

nine depots in a six-kilometer stretch northeast of Kipushi, and all but two were op...

“We use the Metorex to determine the purity of the cobalt,” Hardeep explained. He showed me a small laser handgun that when pointed at a sample of heterogenite returned a reading of the grade of cobalt. “The samples from Kipushi are usually one percent,” Amit said.

drove the heterogenite sacks back to Lubumbashi.

there were two main mining companies that bought the heterogenite from Kipushi—Congo DongFang Mining and CHEMAF. Both companies had cobalt processing facilities in Lubumbashi, and both happened to operate the only two “model sites” for artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC.

kilogram of heterogenite with 1 percent grade was 200 Congolese francs (about $0.11). A forty-kilogram sack, therefore, sold for about $4.40.

Authorization to transport ore and a means of conveyance meant that the négociants operating in Kipushi were able to retain almost 40 percent of the value of each sack of heterogenite. It seemed a needless layer in the supply chain that shifted value away from the people who worked the hardest.

There was nothing to stop mining companies from going to the artisanal sites themselves and directly paying the women, men, and children who dug their cobalt—aside from the negative optics associated with having direct links to hazardous, penny-wage artisanal mining areas teeming with children.

In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups. They also have five times the level of lead and four times the level of uranium. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.

wildlife such as fish and chickens that he tested also showed very high levels of heavy metals.

Contamination by heavy metals of the local population and the food supply was causing a range of negative health consequences across the Copper Belt.

a high rate of birth defects in mining communities, such as holoprosencephaly, agnathia otocephaly, stillbirth, mi...

in most cases, the child’s father had been working as an artisanal miner at the time of conception and that samples of cord blood taken at birth revealed high levels of cobalt, arsenic, and uranium. Respiratory ailments were also common—“

prolonged contact with cobalt by the artisanal miners can cause them to suffer acute dermatitis.”

mining communities, especially of the breast, kidney, and lung.

Cases of lead poisoning were also widespread. Samples of dust taken inside homes throughout the Copper Belt had an average of 170...

lead dust probably came from the clothes of mine workers, as well as metal processing a...

maximum safe limit of 40 micrograms of lead per square ...

cause neurological damage, muscle and joint pain, headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, and r...

irreversible developmental damage as well as weight loss, vom...

public health system in the Congo was not equipped to handle the scale and severity of negative health outcomes being suffered by the p...

Many villages and artisanal mining communities did not have basic medical clinics available to them to treat simple ailments, let alone seizures or cancers.

The mining companies do not control the runoff of effluents from their processing operations. They do not clean up when they have chemical spills. Toxic dust and gases from mining plants and diesel equipment spreads for many kilometers and are inhaled by the local population. The mining companies have polluted the entire region. All the crops, animals, and fish stocks are contaminated.

country’s Mining Code contained provisions that were meant to prevent toxic dumping by mining companies, but none of these provisions or any other laws on environmental protection were adequately enforced.

He sighed and explained that government officials predictably wanted to maximize mining royalties, which meant maximizing the extraction of ore, which meant letting mining companies do as they pleased so long as the royalties were paid.

Germain understandably felt that there was little chance the public health consequences of mining across the Copper Belt would improve until companies were compelled to adhere to minimum standards of sustainability and environmental protection.

Investissements Durables au Katanga (“Sustainable Investment in Katanga”), or IDAK. IDAK is actively involved in the DRC’s artisanal mining sector,

“We founded IDAK in 2011 to provide a forum for representatives of local government, national government, civil society, and mining companies to discuss challenges facing the mining sector and to find solutions in a collaborative manner,” Alex explained. “IDAK is trying to improve cooperation between stakeholders and build the capacities and skills of civil society to support the artisanal miners.”

received most of its funding from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (“German Society for International Cooperation”),

“The funding was initiated by German car companies to help clean their cobalt supply chains,”

IDAK team shared a copy of a comprehensive guide they published in 2014 that outlined their recommendations on corporate social responsibility in the Congolese mining sector.

“This guide includes a plan for the removal of children from artisanal mining,”

programs for strengthening local communities, building and staffing schools, promoting alternate livelihoods, and improving public health capacity and infrastructure.

why so little of it seemed to be happening.

“Yes, we have these problems, but without IDAK, the situation would be worse,” Fortunat said.

“If there is a land dispute, we try to resolve the matter constructively. If there is an accident at the mine, we advocate for the rights of the injured miners,”

conflict resolution on land disputes was an important initiative, although I never heard of a single case in which the dispute had been resolved in a manner that was favorable for the displaced people.

biggest obstacle to their efforts at removing children from artisanal mines. Unsurprisingly, they said, “Poverty.”

If parents earned a good wage, children could be in school instead of working at a mine,”

Let’s say for a moment that paying a decent wage to adult artisanal miners would help keep children in school instead of working in mines and that it would also help families afford medical care when they were ill or injured, save money to help withstand income shocks or other misfortunes, and alleviate strain and violence in the community.

Foreign mining companies would argue that they do not employ artisanal miners, so the responsibility is not theirs, even though the cobalt from artisanal digging ends up in their supply chains, and even though in some cases they allow artisanal miners to work on their concessions to boost production. The government of the DRC would argue that they do not have the money to support good wages or other income schemes, even though mining concessions are sold for billions of dollars and royalties and taxes in the billions are collected each year based in no small part on the value of the minerals excavated by artisanal miners. Cobalt refiners, battery manufacturers, and tech and EV companies would argue that the responsibility should be borne downstream, even though the scramble for cobalt only exists because of their demand for