Thirteen years ago, in May 2011, IPIS participated in the very first meeting in Paris on implementing the newly adopted OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas. At this relatively small gathering – organized by the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), the OECD and the UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – participants focused on how to integrate the guidance’s recommendations to responsibly source 3TG (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold) minerals from central Africa. Seventeen editions later, the OECD Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains has evolved into an established event attracting thousands of delegates from industry, governments, and civil society. Participants discuss a broad array of topics including illicit trade, conflict, human rights, social and environmental impact, women’s rights, etc.; covering minerals from gold to lithium; and spanning regions from the Congolese rainforest to the Amazon, thereby expanding the focus to the energy transition and beyond conflict-affected areas. Thousands of professionals worldwide are now engaged in the responsible minerals ecosystem.
Despite this expansion, so far responsible sourcing efforts have only had limited success in artisanal mining regions of eastern DRC. It gives the impression that the impact of responsible sourcing initiatives on conflict and well-being in places where the minerals are extracted is dismissed in current discussions. With the energy transition amplifying the set and scope of challenges, the responsible minerals community and their meetings are only set to grow. This presents an opportune moment to share some of the findings and lessons learned from the past decade, in order to properly inform this wider scope and their initiatives about challenges and risks with regard to the implementation of due diligence and responsible sourcing efforts more broadly.
Understanding the origins of responsible sourcing efforts
The OECD guidance encourages companies to conduct mineral supply chain due diligence, to ensure they respect human rights, avoid contributing to conflict, and support peace and development. Over the past decade, this voluntary guidance has gained traction through industry efforts and government regulations. To understand its origins, we need to go back to the early 2000s, when minerals linked to tech products were perceived as sources of conflict in Africa, and especially in eastern DRC. Western policymakers, pressured by activist campaigns, began regulating companies within their jurisdictions to eliminate so-called “conflict minerals” from their supply chains, aiming to maintain consumer confidence. The rationale was that minerals finance armed groups, which fuels and perpetuates conflicts. As a result, the DRC government made implementation of the guidance mandatory (2011); the US and EU enacted ‘conflict minerals’ laws: the Dodd-Frank Act, Section 1502 in the US (2010); the EU’s Conflict Minerals Regulation followed seven years later. Driven by these campaigns, laws, and guidelines, eastern DRC became a testing ground for responsible sourcing efforts.
Over the past 15 years, governments, international organizations, civil society actors and industry have launched numerous initiatives aiming to improve mineral sourcing practices in eastern DRC. These include traceability mechanisms to define the origin of bags of minerals, due diligence initiatives that oblige companies to assess the risks (such as child labor and supporting armed groups) along their mineral supply chains, and certification mechanisms that certify that the exploitation of mineral exports have respected a set of minimum standards. Some of the main initiatives include: the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI), which has been established by the International Tin Association (ITA) and represents the largest traceability program for 3T mines; the ICGLR’s Regional Certification Mechanism; and a range of other notable initiatives from the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), IMPACT, Tetra Tech, and the RCS Better Sourcing Program.
However, these efforts have had hardly any success in achieving sustainability and scalability. It is roughly estimated that about 98% of artisanal gold – the most important mineral in eastern DRC with 85% of miners working in gold extraction – is smuggled out of eastern DRC, with much of it ending up in the United Arab Emirates, often via commercial flights from neighboring countries. The ‘three Ts’ (tin, tantalum and tungsten which are derivatives of cassiterite, coltan, and wolframite, respectively) have been the object of considerably more responsible sourcing efforts than gold. While some successes in 3T have been achieved, IPIS’ field research in artisanal mining regions of eastern DRC has revealed numerous issues, such as inaccurate tagging practices, ‘contamination’ of supply chains that are supposed to be monitored with minerals from other mines, a lack of appropriation by DRC stakeholders, and the impact on local sustainable development and conflict is limited.
Underlying challenges for responsible sourcing efforts
The minimal success of these efforts cannot be attributed solely to implementation challenges of individual initiatives. A recurring issue is their failure to address the underlying conditions in the DRC, including widespread poverty, insecurity, working conditions, the informal economy and governance issues (e.g. corruption).
After the Dodd-Frank Act was promulgated in 2010, many international traders stopped sourcing minerals directly from the DRC, affecting the livelihood of around 2 million people, including miners and their dependent communities. While the mineral trade did gradually revive, miners’ revenue does not appear to have meaningfully increased, and miners claim responsible sourcing efforts have not brought them additional revenues. An IPIS study found that mining, while a crucial income source, remains insufficient to meet miner’s basic needs. Another IPIS study concluded that child labor remains prevalent, similar to conditions in non-ITSCI mines.
On the contrary, increased regulation and responsible sourcing initiatives created additional barriers to access resources, risking nurturing socio-economic inequality, such as higher costs, more administrative requirements, limiting artisanal mining to designated zones, and top-down implementation of obligations to, for instance, work within cooperatives. In the case of ITSCI for example, at least 80% of the program costs are passed down the supply chain to the artisanal miners, through export levies and fees. As a result, miners often have little incentive to comply with formal sector regulations. Moreover, mining reform and responsible sourcing have been particularly instrumental to local elites, further weakening ordinary artisanal miners’ positions.
The Canadian NGO IMPACT, which has run the Just Gold sourcing project for eight years in eastern DRC, considered that without immediate rewards for artisanal miners, the future of responsible gold is unpromising. Moreover, they claim that legal gold production and trade are not commercially viable under the current market conditions. Legal traders struggle to compete with prices from the informal market, a problem exacerbated by the ineffective taxation system within the gold sector.
This leads to the next issue: a broad range of governance challenges undermine the effectiveness of responsible sourcing efforts. The informal sector is omnipresent and highly organized in eastern DRC, supported by a vast network of actors and institutions that operate between the legal and informal spheres. In this context, the government struggles to implement the country’s mining legislation, and to regulate the artisanal mining sector. Additionally, technical services of the ministry – on which traceability schemes rely – have limited capacity to exercise their mandate: they have limited means, their agents are often not regularly paid, and people often complain about the misbehavior of these agents. Finally, there is widespread distrust among local mining communities of the state services, and the government more generally, due to the lack of support that these services provide. This reality has left thousands of artisanal mines in the DRC de facto illegal.
The oversimplified link between minerals and conflict
Next, since many of these responsible sourcing initiatives aimed to break the link between mineral supply chains and conflict financing, we try to assess to what extent they impact security in mining areas. Studies confirm that artisanal mining sites with responsible sourcing efforts in place, have lower armed interference. However, this does not necessarily mean responsible sourcing programs directly cause increased security at mining sites. Often, the absence of armed interference precedes the involvement of validation and initiatives. Data from over 1,000 artisanal mining sites in eastern DRC, collected between 2021-2023 by IPIS, shows that around 65% of artisanal miners in the region are still affected by armed actor interference. IPIS findings also concluded that despite higher state presence in ITSCI mines, communities have not experienced a noticeably positive impact in terms of safety.
In fact, the ‘conflict minerals’ narrative has not been helpful in finding structural solutions for sustainable peace in eastern DRC, as the connection between conflict (financing) and mining is quite complex, and often indirect. Economic dimensions of conflict are often interlinked with political and social dimensions. Many ongoing or emerging local conflicts — in which resources may or may not play a role — center around land disputes, access to customary power, perceived social inequalities between communities, failing Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) programs, and poor governance. A case in point is the current M23 crisis, which is strongly fueled by regional and interethnic tensions, and motivated by competition over access to land and local power, and not necessarily (or solely) access to minerals, as is often understood. Additionally, armed groups rely on a diverse set of financing modalities, including household taxes, levies at roadblocks, taxes on a wide range of resources, etc.
A critical analysis by Vogel and Musamba (2021) even argues that responsible sourcing efforts have allowed violence to persist in eastern Congo and, in some cases, exacerbated conflicts, by turning “a blind eye to local complexities”.
Rethink the approach
Responsible sourcing efforts have clearly been too focused on addressing consumer concerns at the end of the supply chain while neglecting the impact these efforts should have exerted upstream, by sustainably improving the impact of mining on development and security. The emphasis has been on creating cleaner supply chains rather than better mining practices. This raises additional concerns because it risks leaving broader issues unresolved. Moreover, the lack of incentives for local actors makes the approach unsustainable once initiatives end, questioning the long-term viability.
It is important to consider what responsible sourcing efforts can realistically achieve. For instance, they are unlikely to resolve armed conflicts—many of which are not linked to mining as mentioned above. Indeed, many initiatives will say that this goes beyond their mandate. However, responsible sourcing efforts do have the potential to contribute more meaningfully to sustainable peace and development. Simply giving buyers a clear conscience is not enough. Incidents and risks along supply chains will always be inevitable. Responsible sourcing efforts should therefore adopt a more comprehensive approach that acknowledges the complex nature of conflict financing, mining and insecurity and provide incentives for miners to engage in responsible sourcing. This approach should involve closer engagement with local stakeholders in eastern DRC. In addition, they should try to build upon existing modalities within the artisanal mining sector and be integrated into broader policies and initiatives, such as peacebuilding projects or DRC’s DDR programs for armed groups.
Walk the talk
The current scramble for critical minerals for the energy transition, a central topic at the OECD Minerals Forum, presents an opportunity to build on over a decade of experiences in integrating due diligence in the 3TG supply chain. However, at present these discussions appear to be largely siloed and little effort is being made to learn from previous successes and failures. A case in point is the attention around cobalt, which mainly seems to be driven by securing its demand and reducing dependency on China, instead of supporting sustainable development. Once more, the complex relationship between mining and conflict, which in this case results more from tensions between companies and adjacent communities, is often dismissed, with a narrow focus on child labor and working conditions.
Moreover, the recently adopted EU regulations to ensure responsible sourcing of critical minerals, including the Critical Raw Material (CRM) Act, the Battery Regulation, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, have mostly gone unnoticed by communities and authorities in the DRC, and no tangible steps have been taken to enforce responsible mining practices. Last year, IPIS researchers gave a presentation on the CRM Act for civil society organizations in Lualaba and Haut Katanga, DRC, regions known for copper and cobalt extraction. None of the 25 participants from CSOs and mining authorities were familiar with the CRM Act. Although European institutions have repeatedly promised to listen to and consult local communities impacted by their decisions, civil society organizations working closely with grassroots movements have often observed a significant disconnect between Brussels and the realities on the ground. This again highlights that these regulations primarily focus on the perspective of those purchasing the materials, rather than on the concerns of those who live near or rely on the operations that extract them.
Further reading
This briefing was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents of the editorial is the sole responsibility of IPIS and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.
