The DRC Sits on $24 Trillion in Minerals: So Why Is It One of the World's Poorest Countries?

 Introduction.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is often described as one of the richest countries on earth in terms of natural resources. Beneath its soil lie deposits of cobalt, copper, coltan, lithium, gold, diamonds, tin, uranium, and rare earth minerals with a combined estimated value exceeding 24 trillion US dollars. These are not marginal commodities. They are the raw materials that the entire global clean energy transition, the electric vehicle revolution, the smartphone industry, and the modern digital economy depend upon absolutely.

And yet the DRC consistently ranks among the poorest nations on earth. According to the World Bank, an estimated 73.5 percent of Congolese people lived on less than 2.15 US dollars per day in 2024. By 2025, 81.1 percent live on less than three dollars per day. The country ranks 164 out of 174 nations on the Human Capital Index. A Congolese child born today can expect to achieve only 37 percent of their productive potential compared to a child in a well-functioning economy with quality health and education systems. More than 25 million people are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance. Many communities across the country lack clean water, reliable electricity, quality healthcare, proper roads, and functioning schools.

This contradiction, extraordinary mineral wealth and extraordinary human poverty existing side by side, is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of a specific set of causes: colonial exploitation that designed the economy for extraction rather than development, chronic governance failure, deep-rooted corruption, the near-total absence of local skills and human capital investment, a regulatory environment hostile to local entrepreneurship, investment-unfriendly policies, a startling degree of ignorance about the true scale and diversity of the country's mineral endowment, devastating armed conflict, infrastructure deficits, and an unequal global trading system that captures most of the value of Congolese minerals outside Congolese borders. This article examines each of these causes honestly and in the depth they deserve.

The DRC illustrates what economists call the resource curse: a situation where countries rich in natural resources experience conflict, corruption, weak institutions, and economic instability rather than broad prosperity. But the resource curse is not inevitable or permanent. Understanding its causes in the DRC is the first step toward understanding how it can be overcome.

What the DRC Actually Holds: The Ignorance of Scale and Mineral Diversity

One of the most underappreciated reasons why the DRC has failed to develop its mineral wealth is that neither the Congolese public, nor most international investors, nor even many Congolese policymakers have a fully accurate picture of what the country actually holds beneath its surface. Coverage typically focuses narrowly on cobalt and copper. The reality is far more extraordinary.

The DRC accounts for 70 to 77 percent of the world's cobalt production, a critical mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy technology. It holds the world's largest deposits of coltan containing tantalum, essential for mobile phones, laptops, and electronic devices. Its copper reserves are among the most significant in the world. It holds substantial lithium deposits increasingly important in the global green energy transition, uranium reserves of global strategic significance, gold and diamond deposits among the largest in Africa, and significant reserves of zinc, manganese, tin, tungsten, and rare earth minerals. The extractive sector accounts for 98.9 percent of the DRC's total exports and 46 percent of government revenues according to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.

The IMF has estimated that the DRC's unmined mineral deposits alone are worth more than the entire GDP of the United States. Yet exploration remains dramatically incomplete. Large portions of the DRC's territory have never been systematically surveyed using modern geological methods. The full scale of what the country holds is genuinely unknown, and what is known is rarely communicated clearly to Congolese citizens, local entrepreneurs, or mid-sized international investors who might otherwise engage.

This ignorance of scale and diversity has real economic consequences. It means that local communities living above mineral deposits frequently have no knowledge of the value beneath their land. It means that Congolese entrepreneurs lack the information needed to participate in the mining value chain. Systematic geological mapping and public dissemination of mineral data are prerequisites for any more equitable distribution of the benefits of Congolese mineral wealth.

Colonial Extraction: A System Designed for Exploitation

To understand modern Congo, it is necessary to understand its colonial history. Under King Leopold II of Belgium, who personally owned the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, the territory became one of the most brutal systems of economic extraction in modern history. Millions of Congolese people died through forced labour, violence, starvation, and disease linked to rubber and mineral extraction for personal enrichment.

Colonial infrastructure was not built to develop local communities. Roads, railways, and administrative systems were designed primarily to move resources out of the country as efficiently as possible. When Belgium took formal colonial control in 1908, this extraction model continued. Industrial and vocational education that might have produced Congolese engineers, geologists, metallurgists, accountants, and lawyers was withheld from the majority of the population for eighty years.

The DRC gained independence in 1960 but the economic structures it inherited were those of an extraction economy with no domestic capability for value addition. The institutional capacity to govern, regulate, and benefit from natural resources had been deliberately suppressed for generations. In many ways, colonial exploitation evolved into modern forms of economic dependency and external influence rather than disappearing. These structural deficiencies are not historical footnotes. They are the direct foundations of every governance, skills, and regulatory failure the DRC experiences today.

Poor Governance: The Single Greatest Obstacle to Development

Of all the factors explaining the DRC's failure to translate mineral wealth into human development, governance failure is the most persistent and the most damaging. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026 assessment is unambiguous: while regulatory reforms suggest a push toward economic liberalisation, corruption, infrastructure deficits, and elite capture continue to undercut private enterprise across the country.

Poor governance operates at multiple levels simultaneously. At the national level, successive administrations have prioritised short-term revenue capture and elite enrichment over long-term institutional development and public service delivery. At the provincial level, administrative capacity is weak, accountability mechanisms largely absent, and local officials frequently operate as agents of personal interest rather than public servants. At the sector level, the mining regulatory framework has been characterised by opacity, inconsistency, and susceptibility to political manipulation.

The consequences are visible across every dimension of Congolese life. Public health spending accounts for just 3.1 percent of GDP according to WHO 2024 data, while 75 percent of citizens rely on out-of-pocket payments for medical care. The National Social Security Fund is crippled by mismanagement and underfunding, with pension arrears exceeding 200 million US dollars and fewer than five percent of enrolled workers receiving timely benefits. Only 12 percent of formal workers are enrolled in the social security system at all. These are the concrete outcomes of a governance system in which the revenues generated by the country's extraordinary mineral wealth are not reaching the public institutions and services that the population depends upon.

Corruption: The Systematic Theft of Development

Corruption in the DRC is not an occasional irregularity. It is a pervasive and systematic feature of economic and political life that touches virtually every transaction between citizens, businesses, and the state. The US State Department's 2025 Investment Climate Statement is explicit: the slow pace of legal proceedings and the susceptibility of low-paid judges to corrupt influences deter investors seeking a reliable legal framework.

For decades, political elites, military actors, foreign companies, and regional power networks have benefited disproportionately from resource extraction. Revenues that could have funded schools, hospitals, roads, and industrial development have been diverted through corruption, illicit financial flows, and opaque contracts. Investigations by Global Witness, the Carter Center, and investigative journalists have documented mining concessions worth hundreds of millions of dollars sold at fractions of their value through offshore intermediaries, with proceeds flowing to political figures rather than the national treasury.

Governance challenges include weak state institutions, limited transparency in mining contracts, tax evasion and profit shifting, political patronage systems, poor public financial management, and limited enforcement capacity. In many mining regions, local communities remain extremely poor despite living directly adjacent to highly profitable mines. This has fuelled deep public frustration and distrust toward both the government and foreign mining actors. ISS African Futures analysis notes directly that poor public financial management and wanton corruption led to hyperinflation, mounting debt, capital flight, and increased poverty throughout the post-independence period, creating institutional habits and informal power structures that persist to the present day.

Lack of Local Skills and Human Capital: The Missing Development Multiplier

The DRC's mineral wealth cannot be transformed into domestic development without a skilled workforce capable of managing, operating, regulating, and adding value to the mining sector. This workforce does not currently exist at the scale needed, and its absence is one of the most consequential and least discussed barriers to equitable mineral development in the country.

The World Bank's Human Capital Index gives the DRC a score of 0.37, meaning a Congolese child born today can expect to achieve only 37 percent of their productive potential. The country has a stunting rate of 42 percent among children under five, with malnutrition the underlying cause of almost half of deaths in that age group. Low child survival rates, high stunting, and low quality of education are the three principal drivers of the catastrophically low human capital score.

In the mining sector specifically, the DRC has very limited domestic capacity in mining engineering, geological survey, metallurgy, environmental management, mining law, or the financial and commercial skills needed to negotiate and manage mineral contracts effectively. When international mining companies arrive, they bring their technical, managerial, and legal expertise from outside the country, employing Congolese workers primarily in lower-skilled and lower-paid roles. The value of the intellectual and professional work associated with Congolese minerals flows almost entirely to other countries.

ISS African Futures analysis notes directly that there is a disconnect between the DRC's education system and the needs of the labour market, with low completion rates and quality among the key challenges. Without targeted investment in mining-relevant technical and professional education, the DRC will continue to produce minerals while exporting the knowledge and expertise needed to add value to them.

Poor Regulation and Absent Incentives for Local Entrepreneurs

Even where Congolese entrepreneurs have the skills and ambition to participate in the mineral economy, they face a regulatory environment that is among the most hostile to private enterprise in the world. Registering a business, obtaining land titles, paying taxes, accessing credit, and enforcing contracts through the legal system are all processes described by the US State Department's 2025 Investment Climate Statement as subject to obstacles linked to corruption, lack of transparency, and host government inefficiency.

The incentive framework for local participation in the mining value chain is particularly weak. The mining code does not contain strong requirements for local content, local employment beyond basic labour, technology transfer, or domestic processing before export. This means the entire value chain from mine to refined product to manufactured good can and typically does take place outside the DRC, with Congolese participants limited to the extraction stage where the value added and wages paid are lowest. A genuinely development-oriented mining regulatory framework would require demonstrated local content percentages in procurement and employment, clear and predictable tax frameworks that investors can plan around, and strong anti-corruption enforcement mechanisms with real consequences for violations. The DRC has none of these features in a fully functioning form.

Conflict Minerals and Armed Groups: The Cycle of Violence and Extraction

Eastern Congo has experienced armed conflict for decades. Armed groups, regional militias, criminal networks, and foreign interests have competed for territorial control and access to valuable minerals. Minerals such as coltan, tin, tungsten, and gold have repeatedly helped finance armed violence, creating a devastating cycle: armed groups capture mining areas, mineral revenues finance weapons and recruitment, violence displaces civilians, state authority weakens further, and illegal extraction expands.

Millions of people have died directly or indirectly from conflict-related causes in the Great Lakes region since the 1990s. By January 2025, more than seven million people were internally displaced in the DRC, the highest figure in Africa, according to UNHCR data. For communities in North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri, the human cost of resource competition is deeply personal. Many families have experienced repeated displacement, insecurity, sexual violence, and economic collapse despite living in mineral-rich territories.

The conflict has also created ideal conditions for mineral smuggling that makes accurate accounting of the DRC's actual extractive revenues almost impossible. Minerals extracted illegally in conflict zones enter global supply chains through neighbouring countries, depriving the Congolese state of revenues while financing further violence. International frameworks including the OECD Due Diligence Guidance and requirements under the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation have attempted to address this, but implementation and enforcement across complex regional supply chains remains deeply challenging. Blockchain technology offers a practical tool for tracking minerals securely from mine to end product, improving traceability and reducing the flow of conflict minerals into global markets, though its adoption across the DRC's fragmented artisanal sector remains at an early stage.

Foreign Exploitation and Unequal Global Trade

The DRC supplies critical minerals to global industries yet the country often captures only a small fraction of the final value chain. Raw cobalt leaves the DRC at a fraction of the value of the finished battery it will eventually power. Processing occurs abroad, battery manufacturing occurs elsewhere, and finished electric vehicles are sold globally for high profits. The most profitable stages of industrial production happen almost entirely outside the Congo.

Chinese companies control an estimated 80 percent of mineral production in the DRC, according to the Center for Global Development. This position was built after US and Western mining companies largely exited southern DRC over the past decade due to concerns about corruption, labour standards, poor infrastructure, and margins. China moved in deliberately, acquiring formerly Western-owned concessions and building long-term supply chain dominance. China is responsible for refining approximately 60 percent of the world's cobalt and controls nearly 90 percent of rare earth processing globally.

Longstanding concerns about the relationship between the DRC and the global mining industry include unfair mining contracts, exploitative labour conditions, child labour in artisanal mining sectors, environmental degradation, limited technology transfer, and capital flight. Many Congolese citizens question whether the global green transition will genuinely improve local lives or simply create new forms of extraction under the banner of sustainability. The DRC has been described by some analysts as a green sacrifice zone: a country exploited in the name of clean energy, where the environmental ambitions of wealthy nations are subsidised by the poverty and suffering of Congolese communities.

Formalising the artisanal mining sector, by bringing its estimated two million workers into the legal economy with registered operations, enforceable safety standards, and access to formal financial services, would simultaneously protect workers from exploitative conditions and generate additional tax revenues that the state currently fails to capture from this significant portion of the mining economy.

Infrastructure Deficits and Limited Economic Diversification

The DRC is geographically vast, covering an area larger than Western Europe, yet it has among the weakest transport infrastructure of any country its size on earth. Poor road networks make it difficult and expensive to move goods between mining regions and processing facilities. Limited electricity access constrains both industrial and domestic economic activity. Underdeveloped rail systems, weak digital infrastructure, and limited industrial processing facilities compound the challenge.

Without strong infrastructure, it is extremely difficult to build manufacturing industries, expand commercial agriculture, create employment at scale, or connect local economies to national and international markets. The economy remains heavily dependent on the export of raw commodities, leaving the country highly vulnerable to global commodity price fluctuations and external economic shocks. When cobalt prices fell to nine-year lows in early 2025, the structural weakness of the DRC's commodity-dependent economy was immediately apparent.

Infrastructure development in the DRC requires levels of sustained long-term investment that have historically been unavailable due to the combination of governance failure, conflict, and limited domestic revenue mobilisation. International development partners including the World Bank and African Development Bank have provided significant infrastructure financing, but the scale of the deficit relative to available financing remains enormous.

The 2025 Cobalt Export Ban: Africa's Most Ambitious Mineral Sovereignty Move

The most significant development in the DRC's mineral story in recent years occurred in February 2025, when the Congolese government imposed a complete ban on cobalt exports. This was a bold and unprecedented assertion of mineral sovereignty. At the time, cobalt prices had fallen to nine-year lows amid a prolonged market surplus. The DRC's decision was a calculated bet that controlling 70 percent of global supply would force Western powers and China to negotiate on Congolese terms.

By October 2025, cobalt metal prices had more than doubled from their February lows of approximately 21,500 US dollars per tonne to over 48,570 US dollars per tonne, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence data. The ban had achieved its immediate price objective. In October 2025, the ban was replaced with a strict quota system managed by ARECOMS, the DRC's Authority for Regulation and Control of Strategic Mineral Substances Markets. Annual export quotas of 96,600 metric tons were set for 2026 and 2027, representing less than half of the DRC's 2024 output of roughly 220,000 metric tons.

However, just weeks after the ban was lifted, President Trump reached a bilateral trade truce with Beijing in which China suspended export controls on critical minerals, securing Washington's mineral access through accommodation with China rather than African diversification. The message to mineral-rich African nations was stark: when the two superpowers negotiate, African producers are not the primary consideration. The DRC's leverage is real but constrained by geopolitical realities that extend well beyond its borders. Similar export restrictions by Zimbabwe on lithium and Namibia on lithium suggest a broader continental shift toward mineral sovereignty, but the effectiveness of this strategy depends heavily on the geopolitical context in which it is pursued.

The People Behind the Statistics: Resilience in the Face of Structural Barriers

Economic data alone cannot capture the reality of life in the DRC. Across the country, millions of Congolese people demonstrate extraordinary resilience, entrepreneurship, and creativity in the face of structural barriers that would overwhelm most. Local markets thrive. Small businesses grow. Communities organise around shared challenges. Civil society organisations advocate for transparency and accountability in the mining sector with courage and persistence.

Congolese researchers, geologists, lawyers, and engineers are building the professional capacity that the country needs, even when the systems around them chronically underinvest in their development. Many communities demonstrate genuine innovation in adapting to circumstances that should, by any objective measure, be untenable. Cultural industries, artistic creativity, and community solidarity represent forms of wealth and human capital that purely extractive economic narratives consistently fail to acknowledge.

Lived experiences from mining communities often reveal the painful contradiction at the heart of the DRC's story: enormous mineral wealth exists beneath the soil yet poverty remains visible above ground. Some mining areas experience environmental pollution, unsafe working conditions, land disputes, and community displacement while local people receive limited long-term benefits. The story of the DRC is not only one of exploitation and suffering. It is also a story of a people with the talent, determination, and ambition to build something far better than what extraction and misgovernance have so far allowed.

Can the DRC Escape the Resource Curse? Pathways Forward

The future of the DRC is not predetermined. There are significant opportunities if governance, transparency, infrastructure, local skills, and industrial development improve across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

Greater Local Value Addition

Instead of exporting mostly raw minerals, the DRC could expand local processing and manufacturing capacity. This would create jobs, support skills development, and generate higher national revenues. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers a framework for building regional processing capacity that could allow Congolese minerals to be transformed into higher-value products within Africa before export.

Transparent Mining Governance and Anti-Corruption Reform

Stronger anti-corruption measures, transparent contracts, and independent oversight of the mining sector could improve public trust and national revenue collection. President Tshisekedi's declared priorities at his second inauguration in January 2024 included fighting corruption, advancing infrastructure, and improving governance, with the US State Department noting his address signalled a potentially improved business environment.

Investment in Human Capital and Skills

Sustained investment in health, education, and vocational training specifically aligned to the needs of the mining and processing sectors is an absolute prerequisite for domestic value capture. Without Congolese engineers, geologists, metallurgists, and financial professionals, the intellectual value associated with Congolese minerals will continue to flow to other countries.

Infrastructure Development

Roads, electricity, education, and digital systems are essential for long-term economic transformation. Without connectivity and reliable energy, neither mining sector value addition nor the development of non-mining industries is achievable at meaningful scale.

Regional Stability and Peacebuilding

Sustainable peace in eastern Congo remains essential for economic growth and human security. Conflict in the eastern provinces continues to displace communities, consume fiscal space, deter investment, and enable illegal mineral extraction that deprives the state of revenues. Without security, governance reforms and investment initiatives cannot deliver their intended outcomes.

Responsible Global Partnerships

International companies and governments face growing pressure to ensure ethical sourcing, fair taxation, environmental protection, and community benefit-sharing. EU regulatory requirements under the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and similar legislation create new accountability frameworks that, if properly enforced, could improve conditions for Congolese communities. The key question is whether the global demand for green minerals translates into genuinely equitable partnerships or merely replicates extraction under new sustainability branding.

Future Trends and Outlook

The global transition toward electric vehicles and renewable energy is likely to increase international demand for Congolese minerals significantly over the coming decade. The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 projects that cobalt demand will grow 50 to 60 percent by 2040, driven primarily by electric vehicle battery deployment. This creates both extraordinary opportunities and significant risks for the DRC.

Opportunities include increased global investment, higher potential export revenues, industrialisation potential through domestic processing, and growing strategic geopolitical importance that gives the DRC leverage it has historically lacked. Risks include intensified geopolitical competition between the US and China that may not benefit African producers, continued environmental damage from expanded extraction, the possibility of continued resource exploitation without equitable community benefit-sharing, and technology risk from the development of cobalt-free battery chemistries that could reduce global cobalt demand over the medium to long term.

The key question is whether the DRC can transform mineral wealth into inclusive national development rather than continued extraction benefiting a limited number of actors. The outcome will depend on governance reforms, regional cooperation, international accountability, investment in Congolese human capital and infrastructure, and the empowerment of Congolese institutions and communities to take genuine ownership of the decisions made about the resources that lie beneath their land.

Conclusion

The Democratic Republic of Congo is not poor because it lacks wealth. It is poor because generations of exploitation, conflict, weak governance, corruption, skills deficits, inadequate regulation, infrastructure gaps, and unequal global economic structures have prevented that wealth from benefiting the majority of its people.

The country's mineral riches have made Congo globally important. Cobalt from the DRC powers the smartphones and electric vehicles of billions of people around the world. But that global importance has also attracted intense competition, external interference, and violence that has compounded rather than alleviated the suffering of ordinary Congolese people. The 2025 cobalt export ban demonstrated that the DRC can act strategically with its mineral resources. Whether that strategic capacity can be applied equally to the human development failures that prevent Congolese people from benefiting from their extraordinary natural inheritance is the defining question of the DRC's future.

Yet the story of the DRC is not only one of exploitation and failure. It is also a story of resilience, potential, and possibility. The country holds immense human, cultural, agricultural, and economic resources beyond minerals alone. If managed fairly and transparently, with genuine investment in the Congolese people and their institutions, Congo's natural wealth could become a foundation for national transformation rather than a source of continued instability. The future of the DRC may ultimately depend not only on what lies beneath its soil, but on whether its people can gain genuine control over the value created from it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much are the DRC's minerals worth?

Some estimates suggest the DRC possesses untapped mineral reserves worth approximately 24 trillion US dollars, although precise valuations vary depending on market prices and reserve estimates. The IMF has estimated that unmined deposits alone exceed the total GDP of the United States. Large portions of the country have never been fully surveyed with modern geological methods, meaning the true figure may be even higher.

What minerals does the DRC produce?

The DRC produces more than fifty identified minerals. The most significant are cobalt, where it accounts for 70 to 77 percent of global supply, copper, coltan containing tantalum, gold, diamonds, lithium, uranium, zinc, manganese, tin, and tungsten. These minerals are central to modern technology, clean energy infrastructure, and global defence industries.

Why is the DRC still poor despite its resources?

Major factors include the legacy of colonial exploitation that destroyed institutional capacity, decades of corrupt governance that diverted mineral revenues away from public services, armed conflict that has displaced over seven million people and consumed fiscal resources, a severe shortage of local technical and professional skills, poor regulatory frameworks that do not incentivise local participation, investment-unfriendly policies, infrastructure deficits, and an unequal global trading system in which most of the value added to Congolese minerals accrues to companies and governments in other countries.

What are conflict minerals?

Conflict minerals are natural resources extracted and traded in ways that help finance armed conflict and human rights abuses. In the DRC, minerals such as coltan, tin, tungsten, and gold have been used to finance armed groups operating in the eastern provinces. International frameworks including the OECD Due Diligence Guidance and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation aim to reduce the flow of conflict minerals into global supply chains.

What happened with the DRC cobalt export ban in 2025?

In February 2025, the DRC imposed a complete cobalt export ban when prices hit nine-year lows. The ban caused prices to more than double to over 48,570 US dollars per tonne by October 2025. It was then replaced with a quota system allowing annual exports of 96,600 metric tons for 2026 and 2027, less than half of 2024 output. A subsequent US-China trade truce reduced the geopolitical leverage the DRC had sought to exercise, demonstrating the limits of mineral sovereignty when superpowers negotiate bilaterally.

Does the DRC supply minerals for electric cars?

Yes. The DRC supplies the majority of the world's cobalt, which is essential for many electric vehicle batteries. This makes the DRC one of the most strategically important countries for the global clean energy transition. The growing demand for electric vehicles is expected to increase global cobalt demand by 50 to 60 percent by 2040 according to the IEA.

What would need to change for the DRC to benefit from its minerals?

Genuine transformation requires simultaneous progress across multiple dimensions: sustained investment in health and education to build human capital, governance reform ensuring mineral revenues reach public services, anti-corruption enforcement with real consequences, a regulatory framework incentivising local participation and domestic value addition, infrastructure investment in roads, electricity, and digital systems, improved security in mineral-producing regions, systematic geological surveying and public dissemination of mineral data, and international partnerships that go beyond resource extraction to support genuine development.

Can the DRC become economically successful?

Yes, with improved governance, infrastructure, peacebuilding, human capital investment, and industrial development. The DRC has significant long-term economic potential that extends well beyond minerals to include agriculture, hydroelectric power, forest resources, and a large and growing population. The 2025 cobalt export ban demonstrated that the country can act strategically with its mineral resources. Whether this strategic capacity can be sustained and broadened into a genuine development programme is the central question of the DRC's future.

 

References

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Bertelsmann Stiftung (2026) BTI 2026 Congo DR Country Report. Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Center for Global Development (2026) A Coming Clash Over Critical Minerals? Washington DC: CGDev.

Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (2024) Democratic Republic of Congo Country Report. Oslo: EITI.

Global Witness (2024) Conflict Minerals and Supply Chain Transparency Reports. London: Global Witness.

International Energy Agency (2025) Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025. Paris: IEA Publications.

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New America (2026) The DR Congo's Cobalt Power Move. Washington DC: New America Foundation.

Serrari Group (2026) How Congo's Cobalt Crackdown Is Cracking China's Critical Minerals Armour. Nairobi: Serrari Group.

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Author: AfricaInfoBase Editorial Team, with contributions from Improve Africa, London

Published: May 2026  |  Category: Africa Business and Natural Resources  |  Website: africainfobase.com  |  YouTube: @AfricaInfoBase