Tracing Revenue Flows, Governance and the Challenges of Poverty Reduction in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Artisanal Mining Sector

Abstract

This chapter is the result of several years of research by a small team of three people who had set out to cast light on some of the discrepancies between the DRC’s artisanal mining legislation and practices in the field, under the title Exploitations minières au Kivu et Maniema: Réalités vs normes (Mining in Kivu and Maniema: Reality vs Norms). Simply put, their goal was to identify the most common illegal practices — which are often carried out in good faith — in order to ascertain what elements of the mining legislation needed to be better disseminated. In fact, the research began with the discovery that the artisanal extraction of minerals, despite its importance to entire regions of the DRC, is hardly taken into account by the 2002 Mining Code. Indeed, the Code only devotes a few articles to it (Art. 109 to 128), or 20 articles out of a total of 344, which cover the whole of the industry from the mining site to the mineral trading house (export stage). This is hardly surprising given that the Mining Code was first drafted with a view to attracting investors to industrially develop the immense mineral resources that state companies such as Gécamines¹ or SODIMICO² were unable to develop on their own due to a lack of financial resources. Similarly, while it is now argued that artisanal miners should organize and improve their operations to raise the technological and legal level of small-scale mining, the Mining Code only briefly addresses the status of small-scale mining, devoting just 12 articles to it (Art. 97 to 108).