Study: DRC Artisanal Copper, Cobalt Miners See Little Gain From Decades of Intervention

The finding that decades of intervention have barely moved living conditions points to a structural problem rather than a funding gap: the abuse IPIS documents is perpetrated by local elites, soldiers and foreign middlemen who sit between the miners and the buyers. That matters for downstream supply chains, since cobalt and copper from Lualaba feed battery and industrial demand, and formal sourcing schemes cannot easily verify conditions at sites where the intermediaries are the ones extracting the value. Whether any intervention can bypass those actors, rather than route through them, is the open question.