# Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Hand-dug, largely informal mining by individuals and small groups — pits, tunnels, sluices, no machinery worth the name — and the human reality underneath every conflict-minerals story. It is also the subject on which the advocacy literature is least reliable, in both directions. ## The scale IPIS has mapped over **2,800 artisanal sites** in eastern DRC since 2009. Roughly **255,000 people mine cobalt artisanally**, concentrated around Kolwezi; UNICEF has estimated around **40,000 children** work in mines across southern DRC across all minerals. Amnesty International's 2016 report *This is what we die for* traced the chain from diggers through traders to Congo Dongfang Mining, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, and on to battery makers and consumer brands — and found the due-diligence responses of most of the 26 companies it wrote to inadequate. Deaths are routine and undercounted. Radio Okapi recorded more than 80 artisanal miner deaths in former Katanga in sixteen months, and thought the real figure much higher. A collapse at the M23-controlled [[Rubaya Coltan Mine]] in early 2026 killed more than 200 people including children. ## The correction that almost never travels > [!warning] The artisanal share of DRC cobalt has collapsed > | Source / date | ASM share of DRC cobalt | > |---|---| > | DRC government via Amnesty, 2016 | ~20% | > | New York Times, cited in *Cobalt Red*, 2021 | 30% | > | Congolese Battery Council, 2023 | as low as 8% | > | Cobalt Institute, 2024 | **4,400–5,000 t ≈ 2% of DRC output** | > > Roughly **98% of Congolese cobalt now comes from large industrial mines.** The artisanal share is highly price-elastic — it swelled above 21,000 tonnes at the 2018 price peak and collapsed when prices fell. Any claim that "the cobalt in your phone was dug by a child" needs that denominator attached to it. This is not a defence of the industry. It is a warning that the most emotionally powerful version of the story is quantitatively the weakest, and that has consequences: it is precisely the overstatement that industry advocates now use to discredit the entire due-diligence agenda. ## The *Cobalt Red* argument Siddharth Kara's 2023 book made the artisanal cobalt story mainstream and drew sustained criticism from researchers who work on the DRC — Ben Radley, Sarah Katz-Lavigne, Emmanuel Umpula of AFREWATCH and Mark Dummett of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, among others. Their objections: the 30% artisanal figure was at the top of an already-falling range; the "modern-day slavery" characterisation is analytically wrong and rhetorically colonial; the novelty claim ignores Amnesty's prior work; and the book contains concrete historical errors, including conflating the Kingdom of Kongo with the modern DRC. Their deeper worry is the one that matters: the 2000s conflict-minerals campaigns "harmed many of the people they sought to support" by suppressing demand for Congolese minerals, and mining is the largest employer in the region after agriculture. **Disengagement is not a remedy for poverty.** Kara's underlying observations — dangerous tunnels, children present, desperate pay, real deaths — are corroborated and should not be waved away. Present the book as influential and its framing as disputed. ## Formalisation, and why it keeps failing **Entreprise Générale du Cobalt**, a [[Gécamines]] subsidiary created in 2019 and launched in 2021, holds a legal monopoly on buying and marketing artisanal cobalt, with a Trafigura offtake agreement and Pact as implementing partner. Two years after launch it was still not operational. At Mutoshi, when an earlier formalisation pilot ended and EGC failed to appear, miner numbers surged from about 3,000 to 15,000 with a single buyer setting prices. In February 2025 the monopoly was finally enforced — **in the same instrument as a blanket four-month suspension of all cobalt exports**, driven by the price collapse rather than by human-rights concerns. It gave way in October 2025 to the ARECOMS quota regime. Five years on, EGC is best described as a state rent-capture instrument that has functioned as an export lever rather than the responsible-sourcing vehicle it was sold as. ## See also [[Conflict Minerals Supply Chain]] · [[Rubaya Coltan Mine]] · [[Gécamines]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]