I am not aware of any conferences about cobalt mining at the OECD in Paris or at UN headquarters in Geneva and New York that included artisanal miners at the table. For that matter, I doubt that many of the people, if any, who participate in these conferences have ever visited an artisanal mining site in the Congo and spoken to the people who work there. The same goes for the CEOs of major tech and car companies that buy Congolese cobalt. Meaningful solutions cannot be devised if they are devoid of direct input from those the solutions are meant to assist. This is particularly true in the
...more
