Every electric car and phone battery runs through Congo. The wealth beneath its soil has brought the world to its mines, and war to its east.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
There is a paradox at the heart of the green transition, and it sits in the red soil of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The world's electric cars, phones and wind turbines depend on minerals that Congo has in abundance: cobalt for batteries, copper for wiring, coltan for capacitors. The United States Geological Survey puts Congo's share of global cobalt production at roughly 70 percent. The country is also one of Africa's largest copper producers. In the language of the energy transition, Congo is not a peripheral supplier. It is the mine the whole project runs through.
And yet the Congolese people are among the poorest on earth. The country ranks near the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index. Its east, the region closest to many of the mineral deposits, has been a war zone, on and off, for three decades, a conflict that has killed and displaced millions and that the world has mostly learned to ignore. The minerals that are supposed to save the planet from climate change are mined in a place where the state barely functions, where armed groups levy taxes at roadblocks, and where children dig in hand-dug pits for a dollar a day. That is the green paradox, and Congo is where it is sharpest.
The eastern war has roots that run back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the two Congo wars that followed, when foreign armies and their Congolese proxies fought across a country the size of Western Europe. The modern chapter is dominated by the M23, a rebellion that first emerged in 2012, was defeated in 2013, and re-emerged in late 2021. Kinshasa has long accused Rwanda of backing the M23, a charge Kigali has repeatedly denied, while Kigali accuses Kinshasa of sheltering the FDLR, an armed group with roots in the genocide. The United Nations Group of Experts has repeatedly reported evidence of Rwandan support for the M23. The result, whatever the precise chain of command, is a war that is simultaneously Congolese, Rwandan and regional.
In January 2025 the war escalated sharply when the M23 captured Goma, the regional capital of North Kivu and a city of more than a million people, after a rapid offensive. The fall of Goma was a humiliation for Kinshasa, a catastrophe for the city's residents, and a shock to a peace process that had been inching forward. The capture displaced hundreds of thousands of people, overwhelmed aid agencies, and brought the conflict to the attention of a world that had spent years looking elsewhere. Goma, a city that has lived with war for three decades, became, briefly, front-page news again.
Diplomacy has not been idle. In June 2025 the DRC and Rwanda signed a peace agreement in Washington, brokered by the United States, committing the two countries to respect each other's territorial integrity, to end support for armed groups, and to cooperate on economic integration and mineral supply chains. The deal followed months of talks, including a separate Qatari-mediated process in Doha that brought Kinshasa and the M23 to the table. On paper, the architecture of peace exists: a ceasefire, a disengagement plan, a monitoring mechanism, and a promise of regional economic cooperation.
The limits of paper are well known in Congo. Eastern Congo has seen a long procession of peace deals, ceasefires and disarmament programmes, most of which collapsed when the incentives of the armed actors changed. The June 2025 agreement is more serious than most, because it is backed by Washington and because it links peace to something both capitals want: investment in minerals and infrastructure. But the deal's core bargain, that Rwanda ends support for the M23 and Congo deals with the FDLR, requires each side to trust the other on the point where trust has always failed. And the M23 itself, which controls territory and collects revenue, has its own interests, which do not automatically align with Kigali's signature.
To understand why Congo matters to the world, follow a battery. An electric vehicle battery needs cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and graphite. Congo supplies the cobalt, and a growing share of the copper. The cobalt belt of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba, in the southeast, is a landscape of industrial mines, owned by international companies, and artisanal sites, where tens of thousands of people dig by hand. The industrial mines produce most of the volume. The artisanal sites produce much of the controversy: dangerous pits, child labour, and middlemen who buy ore at a fraction of its value.
The world's response to this has been a decade of due-diligence rules, audits and corporate pledges. Companies that buy Congolese cobalt are required, by law in some jurisdictions and by public pressure in all of them, to trace their supply chains and avoid minerals linked to child labour and conflict. The results have been partial. Tracing artisanal ore through layers of traders is hard, and the line between a formal mine and an informal one is often a matter of paperwork. UNICEF and the International Labour Organization have documented children working in artisanal mining, and reformers argue that the only realistic path is formalisation: legal sites, safety standards, fair prices and schools, rather than bans that push artisanal miners into worse alternatives.
Congo's government, for its part, has tried to capture more of the value of its minerals. It has renegotiated mining contracts, raised royalties, and pushed for processing inside the country rather than the export of raw ore. The logic is sound: Congo has exported raw materials for a century, and a century of raw exports has left it poor. The difficulty is that processing requires reliable power, transport and a business environment that investors trust, and Congo's infrastructure, after decades of war and neglect, supplies none of those reliably. The Lobito Corridor, a railway project backed by the United States and the European Union to link Congo's copper belt to Angola's Atlantic port, is the flagship attempt to change that. It is also a sign of the times: the corridor is as much about competition with China, which dominates Congo's mining sector today, as it is about Congolese development.
The question that hangs over Congo's mineral wealth is the oldest one in African politics: who profits. The Congolese state collects royalties and taxes, but the state's capacity to turn revenue into roads, schools and hospitals is limited by corruption and by the sheer cost of governing a vast country with almost no infrastructure. International mining companies take their share. Traders take theirs. Armed groups take theirs at roadblocks and in the mines they control. The artisanal miners at the bottom of the chain take what is left, which is rarely enough.
This is not a story of villains and victims alone. It is a story of a global economy that wants Congolese minerals cheap, clean and conflict-free, and a Congolese reality that makes all three difficult at once. Every buyer of a battery is, in a small way, a participant in Congo's economy. Every government that signs a minerals deal with Kinshasa is making a bet on what kind of state Congo can become. The green transition has made Congo indispensable, and indispensability, in the history of resource-rich countries, is a mixed blessing. It brings attention and investment. It also brings competition, interference and the temptation, for outsiders, to treat Congo as a quarry rather than a country.
Western coverage, from Reuters, the Associated Press and the BBC, frames Congo through conflict and supply chains: the M23 offensive, the displacement crisis, and the due-diligence question of whether the world's batteries are clean. The peace deal is covered as a diplomatic achievement, with scepticism about implementation.
Eastern coverage, from Chinese state media and their partners, frames Congo as a development and sovereignty story: a resource-rich country building infrastructure and processing capacity, with China as the largest investor and the most reliable partner. The war is presented as a legacy of Western colonialism and regional interference, and the Lobito Corridor as an American attempt to contain China.
Global South coverage, from African outlets, reads Congo as the continent's oldest wound and its greatest test: a country whose wealth has always been extracted by outsiders, whose wars have always been regional, and whose people have always paid the price. The emphasis is on African solutions, on the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community, and on the demand that Congo's minerals serve Congolese development first.
