This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I have taught primary school in Fungurume for nineteen years. When I started, the town was quiet — Tenke Fungurume mine was not yet operating at full capacity. We had 120 students, three classrooms, and chalk that we bought with our own money because the government supply never arrived.
When CMOC — the company that operates the mine now — expanded operations, Fungurume changed. The population grew as workers arrived. The mine built a new school as part of their community development programme. It was beautiful: painted walls, real desks, a library with books. We were proud.
But then the contradictions started. The mine's concession area expanded, and the path that children used to walk to school crossed the new security perimeter. Guards stopped the children. For two months, students had to walk an extra forty minutes around the concession to reach the school that the mine had built for them. Eventually, after complaints reached the provincial education office, the mine created a controlled crossing point. But the experience revealed something fundamental: the mine's presence dominates our community physically, economically, and socially. Every aspect of life in Fungurume is shaped by the mine's decisions.
The mine's CSR programme funds our school supplies and pays a supplement to teacher salaries. I am grateful. But I am also aware that this creates dependency. If the mine closes — and Mutanda closed in 2019, so it can happen — the school loses its support. The government has not built the capacity to replace what the mine provides. We are educating children for a future that depends entirely on decisions made in a boardroom in Beijing.
What I want for my students is choices. Not just mine jobs. I want them to have skills that work anywhere — reading, mathematics, science, languages. The corridor could help if it brings economic diversification, if the refinery and the processing plants create different kinds of jobs. But if it only makes mining bigger and faster, my students' futures remain as fragile as the cobalt price.
The Children's Questions
My students ask questions that I cannot answer. "Teacher, why does the mine have electricity and our school doesn't?" "Teacher, where does the cobalt go after the trucks take it?" "Teacher, will the corridor give my father a job?" I am trained to teach mathematics and French. I am not trained to explain global commodity markets, development finance, or the political economy of mineral extraction. But these are the questions my students need answered because these are the forces shaping their futures.
I have started incorporating the corridor into my teaching. In mathematics, we calculate transport costs — how much does it cost to move a tonne of cobalt from Fungurume to Lobito by truck versus by rail? In geography, we trace the route on the map — Angola, DRC, Zambia, three countries connected by one railway. In civics, we discuss community rights — what are the legal requirements for companies that want to use our land? My students are more engaged in these lessons than in any abstract textbook exercise. Their lives depend on understanding the corridor; the corridor has become our classroom.
The mining company's education programme promised teacher training. Two workshops were delivered in the first year — useful, practical sessions on classroom management and assessment techniques. Then the programme stopped. Budget constraints, they said. The community relations officer who organised the workshops was transferred to another site. His replacement has different priorities. The pattern is familiar: initial enthusiasm, visible launch, gradual withdrawal, eventual silence.
If I could speak directly to the corridor investors, I would say: education is the longest-term investment you can make. A school that functions today produces engineers, doctors, and teachers twenty years from now. A mine that operates without investing in education produces wealth today and poverty tomorrow. The corridor's thirty-year concession means its operators will still be here when my current students are adults. Will those adults be skilled professionals contributing to a thriving economy, or will they be the next generation of artisanal miners digging in the earth because no one invested in their education? The choice is being made now, in classrooms like mine, every day.
More Voices
The Promise and the Reality
When Tenke Fungurume Mining arrived, they promised everything. Schools would be built. Teachers would be trained. Scholarships would be given. The community would prosper from the wealth beneath our feet. I was young then, newly qualified, full of hope that the mine would transform Fungurume from a forgotten village into a thriving town.
Some promises were kept. A primary school was built — concrete block walls, tin roof, desks donated by the mining company. For two years, it was the best school in the province. Children came from surrounding villages. We had books, chalk, even a blackboard that wasn't cracked. The mining company sent photographers to document their generosity. The photographs appeared in reports that went to investors in China and America.
Then the attention moved elsewhere. The maintenance budget was cut. The roof leaked. The books rotted in the damp. The desks broke and were not replaced. By the third year, we were back to where we started — teaching fifty children in a room designed for twenty, with no materials except what we could buy from our salaries of forty dollars per month. The mining company was still there, trucks still carrying ore past our school every hour, but the community relations office had new priorities.
I teach my students about the minerals that lie beneath their village. I tell them that the cobalt in their parents' fields powers telephones in Europe and America. I ask them: what does it power here? And they look around the classroom — the leaking roof, the broken desks, the absence of electricity — and they understand the answer without me speaking it. The corridor says things will be different this time. My students are waiting to see if that is true.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.