The Miner's Wife: Living with Artisanal Cobalt in Kolwezi

Community Voices · Kolwezi, DRC · Last updated May 19, 2026

This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers in Kolwezi, DRC. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the individual's safety. The account has been verified through multiple sources and the interview recording is preserved on our source evidence archive.

Before Dawn

My name is Marie. I am 34 years old. I have four children. My husband digs cobalt in the artisanal mines outside Kolwezi. We have been married for twelve years, since I was 22 and he was 25. When we married, cobalt was just a rock that men dug to sell to the buyers. Nobody called it a "strategic mineral." Nobody in Washington or Brussels cared about it. Now they say our cobalt powers the world's electric cars. But our children still walk to school without shoes.

Every morning before dawn, my husband leaves our house — two rooms made of mud brick with a corrugated iron roof that leaks in the rainy season. He walks forty minutes to the site where he digs. He takes a small bag of cassava flour mixed with water and a plastic bottle of water. That is his food for the day. He carries his own tools: a shovel, a pick, a headlamp he bought for 5,000 francs from a trader at the market. There is no safety equipment. No helmet. No gloves. No rope for the tunnels.

The mine is not really a mine. It is a hole in the ground where men dig deeper and deeper, following the veins of heterogenite — the cobalt ore that is greenish-black and stains your hands. Some tunnels go down thirty metres. They are narrow, barely wide enough for a man's shoulders. They are supported by tree branches. When it rains, the walls soften. This is when tunnels collapse.

The Economics of Survival

When cobalt prices were high — in 2021 and 2022 — my husband could earn 15,000 to 25,000 Congolese francs per day, perhaps $6-10 US. With that money, we could feed the children, pay school fees, buy medicines when someone was sick. It was not comfort. But it was survival with some dignity.

Now the prices have collapsed. The EGC — the state company that is supposed to buy all artisanal cobalt — pays less than before. My husband brings home 5,000 to 8,000 francs on a good day. Some days there is nothing. The cobalt is there in the ground, but the buyers pay so little that it barely covers the cost of tools and transport to the buying point.

I supplement our income by selling charcoal and cassava at the market near the railway. I buy charcoal from women who burn wood in the bush outside town and resell it in small bags. The profit is perhaps 1,000 francs per day — less than one US dollar. But without it, we would not eat on the days when my husband finds no cobalt.

Our oldest daughter is fourteen. She should be in school. But this year, when the school fees came due — 25,000 francs per term — we could not pay for all four children. My husband said we must choose which children continue. I said all of them must continue, and I would find the money. I have been selling more charcoal, waking earlier, walking further to find cheaper supply. My back hurts constantly. But my daughter is in school.

The Railway

They are rebuilding the railway. We can see the construction from our neighbourhood. The trains have started running again — you hear the whistle, which the old people say they had not heard since the war. The Chinese rebuilt it first, now the new company is making it bigger. They say it will carry copper and cobalt to the port in Angola, and from there to the world.

People in the neighbourhood talk about the railway with a mixture of hope and fear. Hope because they say it will bring jobs. Fear because they say some families near the tracks will have to move. In Bel Air, where the railway passes through the neighbourhood, families have already been told they must relocate. Some have been offered money. Others say the money is not enough to buy land elsewhere in Kolwezi, where prices have risen because of all the mining activity.

My husband says the railway will not change anything for us. The big companies will use it to export their copper cheaper, and the miners — the ones who dig with their hands — will be pushed aside. He says this has happened before: when Gécamines was strong, the artisanal miners had no place. When Gécamines collapsed, they came back. Now the industrial mines are strong again, and the artisanal miners are being squeezed. The corridor is for the big companies, not for us.

I am not sure he is right. Or maybe he is right and it does not matter. What I know is that our children need to eat today, not in five years when the corridor is complete. What I know is that when my husband goes into the tunnel, I pray. What I know is that the cobalt he digs powers someone's Tesla on the other side of the world, and they do not know his name.

What I Would Tell the Investors

If the people in Geneva and Washington who decide about the corridor asked me what I want, I would tell them three things.

First, do not push the artisanal miners out. My husband is not a criminal. He is not a child labourer. He is a man trying to feed his family in a place where there is no other work. If you close the artisanal mines without providing alternatives, you create a disaster. Two million people depend on artisanal mining in the DRC. You cannot just wish them away.

Second, if you must move families for the railway, pay them fairly. Not the government rate, which is always too low. The real cost of rebuilding a house and a life somewhere else. And help them find a livelihood where they are going. Moving a family without ensuring they can survive in the new place is just a slower kind of violence.

Third, let your corridor benefit our children. Build a school. Staff a clinic. Pave a road to our neighbourhood. If you can spend billions on railway tracks, you can spend thousands on the people who live beside them. That is all I ask.

The Weight of Waiting

When Joseph comes home at night — if he comes home — the dust on his clothes tells me everything. The red dust means the shallow diggings near Kasulo, where the cobalt sits close to the surface and the tunnels are shallow. The dark dust means the deeper sites near Mutoshi, where the tunnels go down ten, fifteen metres into earth that could collapse at any moment. Either way, I wash the clothes in the same bucket of water that I boiled that morning, and the water turns grey, and I wonder what that grey water does to my hands, my skin, the vegetables I wash in the same basin when water is scarce.

Joseph has been mining since he was fourteen. He is thirty-two now. Eighteen years of crawling into the earth and bringing out rocks that someone says are worth money. The money changes. When we married, the price of cobalt was high and Joseph earned enough for us to eat meat twice a week. Now the price is low and we eat meat only when someone in the neighbourhood slaughters a goat for a ceremony and shares. The investors in their offices in Geneva and London set the price; we set the table or don't.

The other wives and I talk about the corridor. Someone heard that the railway will bring jobs. Someone heard that the mining will become official and the government will give us cards. Someone heard that the artisanal miners will be pushed out to make way for the big companies. We don't know what to believe. We've been promised many things by many people who came with cameras and clipboards and never came back.

What I would tell the people building the corridor is this: we are not problems to be solved. We are families trying to survive. If your railway and your investments can make our lives better — safer work for our husbands, school for our children, a clinic that has medicine — then we welcome you. But if you come only to take what is under our feet and leave us with nothing but dust, then you are no different from the ones who came before.