This report serves as a companion piece to CGSP’s Interactive Cobalt Tracker. While the map provides detailed, up-to-date data on the cobalt industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this report offers the broader context needed to understand that data.

Supply chains for critical minerals like copper and cobalt have emerged as one of the most geopolitically fraught areas in global trade. The tension is driven by the overlap of a rapidly encroaching climate crisis and growing geopolitical tensions between global producers of key technologies like energy storage systems and electric vehicles that depend on these critical minerals. As a result, global powers like the United States, China, and Japan are racing to secure access to mineral resources in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, global conversations about the equitable use of these resources have been hampered by a lack of on-the-ground data about their extraction, the stakeholders involved and how this involvement extends to the logistics corridors crucial to exporting the resulting minerals.