Blood, Cobalt, and Silence: The Human Cost of Everything We Own

Pick up your phone. Look at it for a moment. That battery inside it — the one you charge every night without thinking — almost certainly contains cobalt. And an uncomfortably large proportion of that cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, extracted from the earth by a child who had no shoes, no gloves, no mask, and no birth certificate to prove they ever existed.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is not a distant abstraction. It is the supply chain underpinning almost every consumer electronics device manufactured in the world today, and it runs directly through one of the most documented humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century.

The Country That Powers the World and Cannot Feed Itself

The Democratic Republic of Congo holds more than 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves. The country is projected to supply 225,000 metric tons of cobalt in 2024. Cobalt is essential for lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, smartphones, and numerous other electronic devices. Without Congolese cobalt, the green energy transition stalls. The electric vehicle industry stops. Every smartphone factory on earth slows down.

And yet the DRC ranks among the world’s poorest nations. Its people live without reliable electricity, without adequate hospitals, without functional schools. Its children die in the mines that power the rest of the world’s devices. The gap between what the DRC produces and what the DRC receives is not a market failure. It is a system operating exactly as designed.

The DRC previously received more than 70% of its humanitarian assistance from the United States. In 2025, over 25 million Congolese people needed emergency humanitarian assistance. Then the Trump administration withdrew from the World Health Organization and terminated essential USAID programs. Much of the humanitarian aid disappeared precisely when the need escalated due to increased violence.

Children as Young as Six, Working in Graves

An estimated 40,000 children currently work in cobalt mines in the DRC. Some are as young as seven years old. They work in unsafe conditions for wages that average $0.81 per day.

The International Bar Association Human Rights Institute sent investigators into these mines. What they found deserves to be read slowly. They described scenes like “Dante’s inferno, without the fire.” Children mined cobalt with their bare hands and spades, tipping it into trucks — each truck holding a million dollars worth of cobalt. Mothers with newborns strapped to their backs waded through toxic water, shovelling cobalt. Investigators found holes in the ground dug by children without any safety equipment. Many children collapsed inside these holes. The investigators noted they were likely walking on the graves of those who did not make it out.

Most of these children have no homes and no identity documents. They do not technically exist. They cannot be counted. They cannot be protected. They are, in the coldest possible sense, disposable.

A child named Faustin, aged 11, described his experience: he missed years of school, watching friends attend classes while he went underground for cobalt. Another child, Steve, aged 14, described returning home every day with his whole body aching, the bags of ore so heavy that children got sick constantly. A 12-year-old named Muntosh described a landslide that killed his brother while they were mining together. He was in first grade at the time.

Before a US Congressional commission, anti-slavery economist Siddharth Kara testified that children face inhumane working hours of up to 24 hours each day, exposure to toxic materials, physical abuse, and sexual exploitation. He described the situation as “de facto informed silence and continued inaction in response to the worst devastation of basic human rights of the most vulnerable.”

This has been on the US Department of Labor’s list of commodities produced by child or forced labour for 14 years. Nothing changed.

The Bodies of Women and Girls as a Theatre of War

If what happens to children in the DRC’s mines is one crime, what happens to women across the conflict zones surrounding those mines is another — larger in scale and more deliberately inflicted.

The United Nations Population Fund reported over 80,000 cases of rape in eastern Congo between January and September 2025 alone — a 32% increase from the same period in 2024. The DRC’s UN peacekeeping mission has documented that all parties to the conflict systematically use sexual violence as a weapon of war.

The UN recorded over 113,000 cases of sexual violence in the DRC in 2023, with figures reportedly doubling in 2024. Dr. Denis Mukwege — Congolese gynaecologist, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate — wrote in a joint report: “Women and girls have paid and continue to pay a very high price in this forgotten war and neglected crisis. The systematic recourse to rape and gender-based violence, including sexual slavery and forced pregnancy, used by all combatant forces — Congolese and foreign armies or armed groups — has been characterised by the widespread and systematic nature of these most heinous crimes. Some are forced to marry their rapists.”

A UN Human Rights Office report documented M23 forces systematically carrying out widespread gang rape and sexual slavery in North and South Kivu. Women and girls faced disproportionate targeting. Rapes continued over prolonged periods, often alongside physical and psychological torture, “with a manifest intent to degrade, punish, and break the dignity of victims.”

The UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy told the Security Council that rape and other forms of sexual violence function as a weapon of war “to destroy lives, families and communities.” Between December 2024 and February 2025, child abduction cases increased sixfold.

Médecins Sans Frontières found that more than one in ten young women in displacement camps reported being raped between November 2023 and April 2024. These are not women in combat zones. These are women who fled violence, seeking safety, and found more of the same in the camps built to protect them.

Health workers in the Bulengo IDP camp near Goma report an average of five to seven sexual violence survivors arriving every day for treatment — averaging six child and adolescent survivors of sexual violence under 18 every single week. Women and girls account for nearly 90% of all cases. Sexual violence against children increased by 40% in the same reporting period.

The connection between this violence and the mining economy is direct. Armed groups control territory because they control mines. They hold communities in terror because terrorised communities do not resist extraction. Sexual violence is the enforcement mechanism of resource theft.

The Dan Gertler Network: Corruption With a Name and an Address

When analysts ask who benefits from Congo’s resource wealth — beyond the technology companies that buy cheap cobalt — one name surfaces repeatedly in the documentation of international anti-corruption bodies: Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose operations in the DRC have been the subject of formal US Treasury sanctions, civil society investigations, and parliamentary hearings.

The US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Gertler in December 2017 under the Global Magnitsky Act — the programme targeting serious human rights abuse and corruption — describing him as “an international businessman and billionaire who has amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The Treasury found that Gertler used his close friendship with former DRC President Joseph Kabila to act as a middleman for mining asset sales, requiring multinational companies to go through him to conduct business with the Congolese state.

Human Rights Watch, leading a coalition of Congolese and international civil society organisations, calculated that the DRC reportedly lost over $1.36 billion in a single two-year period — 2010 to 2012 — as a direct result of Gertler’s corrupt deals. That figure represents nearly half of the country’s entire health budget over those years.

The coalition “Congo Is Not For Sale” estimated that Gertler’s Ventora Group would earn at least $1.76 billion in royalties between 2021 and 2039 from just three mining projects — an average of more than $254,000 per day over 19 years. This money, flowing to a sanctioned individual in tax-efficient offshore structures, represents resources that could have funded the hospitals that don’t exist, the schools the children aren’t attending, and the roads that don’t reach the clinics that could have treated sexual violence survivors.

Evidencity, a supply chain intelligence firm, noted in its 2026 analysis: “Figures like Dan Gertler exemplify the murky networks operating behind the scenes. His opaque deals with state-owned enterprises diverted public revenues that could have been used to improve miner safety and wages. His role illustrates how entrenched interests have capitalised on the absence of oversight and regulation.”

Global Witness, the anti-corruption investigative organisation, documented in November 2025 that a network of bot-like social media accounts and Congolese news websites spread disinformation attempting to rehabilitate Gertler’s reputation and arguing for the lifting of US sanctions against him. The machinery of influence, it turns out, operates online as well as underground.

In January 2021, as Trump’s first term ended, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin granted Gertler a one-year licence to conduct business with US entities — a move that generated fierce criticism from human rights groups and Democratic lawmakers. The Biden administration subsequently cancelled the licence. Under Trump’s second term, reports indicate that the US is again considering sanctions relief for Gertler. Human rights organisations warn that granting it would reward corruption, set a precedent of impunity, and further expose US companies to foreign corruption risk.

Gertler has consistently denied wrongdoing. His spokesperson has stated that an Israeli arbitration decision “explicitly concludes that there was no evidence of corruption in our operations.” Civil society groups — including Congolese organisations — have disputed that characterisation, arguing that the arbitration covered a specific business dispute between partners, not the full scope of his activity in the DRC.

The Corporate Supply Chain and Its Convenient Blindness

The cobalt that leaves the DRC in the hands of children and the blood of women does not stay there. It travels. It gets refined, primarily in China. A US Congressional commission found that 80% of cobalt produced in the DRC is controlled by Chinese companies and refined in China, often under conditions marked by labour rights abuses in both mining and processing. Fifteen of the DRC’s 19 cobalt-producing mines are owned or financed by Chinese entities.

From Chinese refineries, cobalt enters the global battery supply chain. It ends up in products sold by Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, and every other consumer electronics company that powers the modern economy.

In December 2019, International Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against Google, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, and Dell on behalf of fourteen DRC parents and children. Economist Siddharth Kara — who has spent years documenting modern slavery — accused the companies of complicity in the deaths and severe injuries of children employed in cobalt mines. The families sought damages for forced labour, unjust enrichment, and negligent supervision. In March 2024, a US Court of Appeals ruled in the companies’ favour.

The companies won in court. The children did not win in the mines.

Children as young as six work in mining activities, earning approximately $0.81 per day. Adult women earn $1.02 per day. Adult men earn $2.04 per day. The differential is not incidental. It reflects a hierarchy of exploitation in which gender and age determine how little a person can be paid for genuinely dangerous work.

As York Law Society’s analysis found: “Corporations such as Apple, Tesla, and UK-based Glencore continue to exploit Congolese miners, disregarding human rights violations tied to their supply chains. This systemic exploitation leaves workers with lifelong scars — severe injuries from unsafe working conditions, psychological trauma from sexual violence and rape, and intimidation by armed groups — while contributing to the social and economic destabilisation of the country.”

Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, stated plainly: “The forced evictions taking place as companies seek to expand industrial-scale copper and cobalt mining projects are wrecking lives and must stop now. Climate justice demands a just transition. Decarbonising the global economy must not lead to further human rights violations. The people of the DRC deserve better.”

A Christian Nation That the World Treats as Invisible

One further dimension deserves acknowledgment, even briefly. The Democratic Republic of Congo is an overwhelmingly Christian country — predominantly Roman Catholic and Protestant, with a deeply religious population. Roughly 95% of Congolese identify as Christian. This is not a detail about which faith is more sympathetic. It is a point about selective indignation.

The same Western governments and media organisations that speak loudly about the suffering of some populations fall silent about others. The Congolese are not Muslim. They share the dominant faith of their Western critics. And yet their suffering — documented exhaustively by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Bar Association, the US Congress, and Nobel Prize laureates — receives a fraction of the coverage and political attention that comparable crises elsewhere generate.

If selective moral concern is not the explanation, then indifference to African lives is. Neither reflects well on those who claim to care about human rights.

The Accountability That Has Not Come

Public Citizen’s analysis noted that a proposed US-DRC “minerals for security” agreement — modelled on the Trump administration’s Ukraine deal, which includes preferential access to significant mineral resources — has drawn criticism from US Congressional members and Congolese civil society for a lack of transparency and meaningful consultation. While companies such as KoBold Metals, backed by investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, actively pursue access to the DRC’s mineral wealth, vulnerable local communities in mineral-rich regions continue to suffer immensely from human rights abuses.

The pattern is consistent. The powerful negotiate resource access. The people who live above those resources absorb the violence, the dispossession, and the health consequences. The powerful sign agreements. The people sign nothing — because their consent was never sought.

Sara Elizabeth Dill, co-vice chair of the International Bar Association’s War Crimes Committee, demanded: “Justice must be real, focused and visible for survivors. We cannot wait for the next atrocity or lengthy justice process. Even if convictions are achieved, the trauma remains. Let us act firmly, humanely, and without delay. Let us ensure that the survivors of Congo are never again forgotten or abandoned.”

In his testimony to the US Congress, Siddharth Kara described the biggest beneficiaries of Congolese cobalt as choosing silence, refusing to face the uncomfortable truth embedded in their supply chains. He described the situation as “de facto informed silence” — a choice, not an oversight.

The Device in Your Hands

This article asks something specific and uncomfortable of the person reading it.

The phone in your pocket. The laptop on your desk. The electric vehicle you plan to buy to reduce your carbon footprint. The battery storage system someone is trying to sell you as sustainable energy. All of these almost certainly contain cobalt. And that cobalt, with a very high statistical probability, passed through the hands of a Congolese child who had no shoes, through the territory of an armed group that uses rape as its primary instrument of territorial control, through a supply chain whose opacity is maintained deliberately — because transparency would require accountability, and accountability would require change.

A Congolese child named Muntosh, 12 years old, described the day a landslide killed his brother next to him while they mined for cobalt. He was in first grade when it happened. That cobalt reached a factory. That factory produced a battery. That battery ended up in a product sold by a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars that won a court case arguing it had no knowledge of and bore no responsibility for what happened at the bottom of the supply chain.

The law agrees with the company. History may not.

Sources: Humanium — “The Current State of Child Labour in Cobalt Mines in the DRC,” May 2025 (citing Save the Children 2024, Amnesty International, IMPACT 2023); International Bar Association Human Rights Institute — Report on Sexual Violence, Minerals and Child Labour in the DRC, July 2025; Human Rights Watch — “DR Congo: Surge in Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,” February 2026; Human Rights Watch — “West Bank: Israeli Government Enables Escalating Violence, Displacement, Ethnic Cleansing,” World Report 2025; Human Rights Watch — Joint Letter on Dan Gertler Sanctions Relief, March 2023; Amnesty International — “Powering Change or Business as Usual? Forced Evictions at Industrial Cobalt and Copper Mines in the DRC,” September 2023; OHCHR — “DRC: UN Report Raises Spectre of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in North and South Kivu,” September 2025; UN News — “Sexual Violence Systematically Used as a Weapon of War in DR Congo,” April 2025; UN Security Council — “As Displacement, Sexual Violence Surge in DRC, Special Envoy Tells Security Council,” 2025; Physicians for Human Rights — “Massive Influx of Cases: Sexual Violence in Eastern DRC,” October 2024; Canadian Lawyer Magazine — “New Report Tackles Sexual Violence, Mining, Child Labour in DRC,” July 2025; US Department of the Treasury — “Treasury Sanctions 14 Entities Affiliated with Dan Gertler Under Global Magnitsky,” 2018; Global Witness — “Bot-Like Accounts Supporting Sanctioned Mining Billionaire,” November 2025; Evidencity — “The Human Impact of Cobalt Sourcing,” January 2026; Public Citizen Global Trade Watch — “The Deadly Cost of Cobalt Mining in the Congo,” December 2025; York Law Society — “Cobalt and Consequences: Unmasking Corporate Complicity in the DRC’s Human Rights Crisis,” March 2025; Global Justice International Centre — “Major Tech Companies Accused of Child Labour in Congolese Cobalt Mines,” 2024; US Congressional Commission — Siddharth Kara testimony; Dr. Denis Mukwege — IBA Joint Report, 2025; Mongabay — “NGOs Urge Continued Sanctions Against DRC Mining Giant Dan Gertler,” 2023.