Coltan and The Congo
- ehizogie okojie
- Nov 15, 2020
- 2 min read
Coltan is a mineral that is used for the production of tantalum. Tantalum is one of the key raw materials used in today's cell phones, iPads, and almost ever kind of electronic device. Coltan is normally found while mining, and is found with another mineral called niobium. They both have very different properties, while Coltan is used for primarily electronics, niobium is used for steels. Coltan plays a key value in our every day lives, and it is important that we know where the mineral comes from and how it is mined.
Despite all of the technological advances that Coltan provides, the process of mining the mineral is what provides instability in the Dominican Republic of Congo. The market has increased significantly for the production of Coltan, but do you know the process of mining coltan? The Congo has several people including children ages seven and up, who dig around beds and scrape away at dirt surfaces in order to find these minerals. They work countless hours day and night to mine for industries. The workers do not get paid based off of what they individually find, instead they get paid a share of what all of the workers find which is somewhere between $40-$50 a week. This goes to show the economic struggle that the Congo undergoes every day and their living situation. The mining land owners are the ones who benefit from the booming economic opportunity of coltan, not the miners and workers.
Several conflicts have rose in the Congo with coltan, including a turf war over land rights. There have been several armies who smuggle coltan back to countries such as Rwanda in order to make profit off of it, because they do not have any coltan mined in their country. Rwanda has two hundred and fifty million dollars off of selling the coltan that was mined in the Congo in a period of eighteen months! Another conflict in the Congo is the conditions in which the workers are mining for the Coltan. An example is a girl named Solange, who faced abuse every day at the mines. She started working at the age of seven, and was married at the age of 14 with two kids. She was just 15 years old when her boss started demanding sex from her, in exchange for a higher pay. She stated that her life in the mines was hard and she got sexually abused by her boss every week. She also stated that she "could not give up the job because she needed money to support her children and parents". This is just one example of a young girl working in the mines of the Congo, which is why we ask you to spread awareness to not only her individually story, but to the whole story of Coltan in the Congo.
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