Born in Walikale Territory, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s mineral-rich region of North Kivu, Bosco became an artisanal miner at the age of 12, after his parents were killed in the war. “I had to drop out of school to work in the mines to earn some income to take care of my four siblings, the youngest of whom was only two at the time,” he told Africa in Fact from the capital Kinshasa.
Bosco, now 38, is in the capital to seek medical care after nearly three decades of working under dangerous conditions, including exposure to dust and silica, which has affected one of his lungs. However, after 26 years of service, he said he had nothing to show as a “trophy” in this informal, chaotic, and unregulated sector, which he said was plagued by trickery, mafia, and a lack of transparency in local supply chains.
“On one hand, some people claim to represent international traders and large companies who rip us off by paying us very little money and reselling the stones to the highest bidders. On the other hand, Asian buyers, including Chinese and Indians, impose their price on a take it or leave it basis. It is a hopeless situation.” In short, he said, the mining sector in DRC has been hijacked by foreigners and armed groups, thanks to weak state accountability. He said that if it had not been for the financial support of his fellow miners, who put money together, he would have probably died.
Bruce Byiers, associate director for Sustainable and Inclusive Economic Development at the European Centre for Development Management (ECDPM), told Africa in Fact that since artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) was essentially an unregulated market, workers were unprotected. “The lack of other employment opportunities also means they have limited bargaining power to raise their wages or have protection, meaning that the profits are concentrated in the hands of the few who control the mines, often with links to the army and government,” he said.
More than 300 armed groups are operating in DRC, and most of them are believed to be extracting minerals in the areas they control, while killing and kidnapping civilians, and committing serious human rights violations. UN experts said in a report in 2024 that gold in the north-eastern province of Ituri continued to be exploited outside of state control, generating at least $140 million per year for armed groups and criminal networks. They also said that the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels had established a “mining ministry” to oversee mineral exports, including the much-sought-after coltan, from the Rubaya mine, and collected $800,000 per month in taxes on coltan production and trade. The rebels seized the town in April 2024.
The Rubaya mine produces nearly 20% of the world’s coltan, which is largely dug manually by local artisanal miners. They plunge into pits using tools, including shovels and hammers, and manually separate it from water. Bosco refused to say how much an average artisanal miner earned, but a mining ministry source said their daily wage hovered between $5 and $15, depending on the site where they worked.
Poorva Karkare, a senior policy analyst at ECDPM who works on issues of industrialisation and regional integration, said that depending on the kind of activity, miners earned different levels of wages, but typically, those doing the hardest manual work, which required going down a pit, often received lower wages.
Bosco said he would rather work in a peaceful area controlled by the government than take chances. “I have seen worse working [conditions] in a rebel or militia-held area,” he said, declining to give further details or name the groups for security reasons. However, he added that even in government-controlled areas, security forces protected foreigners more than local small-scale miners.
Bosco’s cousin, Vincent, also a small-scale miner who had accompanied him to the capital, deplored the government’s “hate” for small-scale miners, who, he said, only worked to improve their lives and support their families. “Why does the government keep chasing us away from mining sites?”
In 2019, DRC security forces intervened to expel more than 10,000 artisanal miners encroaching on two of the country’s largest industrial mining sites in the mineral-rich provinces of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba. Vincent claimed that some university graduates worked as artisanal miners because life was getting harder and formal jobs were scarce.
Unemployment in DRC hovers around 90%, and 97.5% of all workers earn a living in the informal sector. In a July 2025 report, the World Bank noted that despite the DRC’s exceptional natural resources, most people had not benefited from this wealth.
Equally, the Panzi Foundation, a non-profit headquartered in the DRC with an office in Washington DC, said in a recent report of its own that although the country possessed a significant share of the world’s mineral wealth, including an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral resources, the people who lived on top of these riches received little benefit because much of the extraction and trade was controlled by armed groups and foreign interests.
“Armed groups and corrupt officials siphon off the wealth, leaving local populations trapped in poverty. Workers, including children, are forced to toil in dangerous and degrading conditions in the mines, receiving little pay for their labour,” the report noted. At least 40% of workers in ASM in the DRC are children, a figure representing about 200,000 child miners, while in gold mining, children constitute 30-35% of the total labour force in the industry.
ECDPM’s Karkare said regulation was urgently needed to help lay mechanisms for workers’ social protection. “ASM requires better regulation, while at the same time, there is a need to create more economic opportunities beyond mining itself so that the strain on land resources is also kept in check,” she said.
However, a DRC mining ministry official described efforts to regulate the ASM sector in war-torn DRC as like trying to climb Mt Kilimanjaro. “It’s only possible if peace and stability fully return to the country,” they told Africa in Fact. “First, we don’t know exactly how many artisanal miners work in this country, and where. As we speak, many mineral-rich areas remain under the control of armed groups and illegal foreign companies, which employ their own people to dig for minerals.”
Another government source, who also preferred to remain anonymous, said they believed ASM had to be eradicated at all costs because it was not contributing to fiscal revenue. At the same time, it was also the cause of many deadly accidents, fuelling corruption, child exploitation, conflict and insecurity, and represented “manna from heaven” for armed groups and militias, which used the proceeds to fund their activities.
Karkare pointed out that “ASM happened on a small scale at mine level, and so the level of tax revenue for the government on each of these would be small. If you add up all the individual mines, it makes for a significant activity, but the tax revenues would still be limited if the sector were regulated and it paid taxes. Instead, one industrial mine over the same area would generate more revenue for the state and make it administratively easier to maintain oversight as one big operator rather than thousands of small ones.”
This, she said, presented a dilemma for the state. “Regulating ASM entails more costs than it can generate in revenues. But the binary between ASM and industrial mining is a false one because ASM creates more jobs even if it doesn’t contribute much in terms of revenues, and while industrial mines can generate tax revenues, these do not always materialise due to different exemptions.”
ASM, she said, created significant employment opportunities. “Artisanal gold mining in DRC employs between 200,000 and 350,000 people, with about four to five dependents per miner, so we can safely assume that artisanal gold mining on its own supports between one million and 1.75 million people.” Overall, she said, DRC’s industrial mining employed about 665,000 people, while ASM, not just gold, employed up to two million people -although exact numbers were difficult to ascertain.
Nonetheless, despite all the sector’s challenges, NDCPM’s Byiers said an array of international agreements linked to transparency and raising awareness about the conditions under which the minerals used in technologies were mined could put external pressure on the sector and the companies operating in DRC. “Ideally, however, this needs to be combined with effective, fair governance that genuinely seeks to improve the livelihoods of local people.”
“Apart from international benchmarks,” Karkare concluded, “state capacity needs to be strengthened in designing effective policies and enforcing national regulations that can serve to maximise revenues, create livelihoods in the mining sector, protect other livelihoods, and safeguard the environment.”
Kinshasa-born Issa Sikiti da Silva is an award-winning freelance journalist, having won the SADC Media 2010 Awards in print category. He is also a published author, his novel “Bloodshed on the Streets of South Africa” was released in September 2025. He has travelled extensively across Africa, living in South Africa for 18 years, where he worked for 10 years as a journalist. In 2012, he left for West Africa, and later to East Africa, to work as a foreign correspondent. He is currently based in Dakar, Senegal.
