Making Mining Safe and Fair: Artisanal Cobalt Extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
September 2020
More than 70% of the global production of cobalt takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), of which 15–30% comes from so-called artisanal and small-scale mines. This white paper assesses recent approaches to formalizing artisanal and small-scale mining of cobalt. The learnings from the cobalt context in the DRC can help guide companies on how to address human rights issues in their global mineral supply chains and improve working conditions of more than 40 million people in artisanal mining worldwide.
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