So in the 21st century, this is modern-day slavery. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, 'Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?' And if they choose the latter, that means bringing all their kids into these toxic pits to dig just to earn that extra fifty cents or a dollar a day, that could mean the difference between eating or not. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. On why these conditions are on par with slavery And so that's not legal, but it's happening. Well, you put them in a tight pit, cram them with 10,000 other people and pay them a couple of dollars, and they'll produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year for almost no wages.

I mean, imagine you're in a part of the world where there are millions of people who barely get a dollar or two a day who are grindingly poor and will accept almost any labor arrangement just to survive. And the reason is, it's a penny-wage way to boost production. In some cases, predominantly artisanal mining is taking place. And yet, lo and behold, at most of the industrial mines, there is some artisanal mining taking place. Technically, under the law, there should not be artisanal mining taking place in any industrial mine.

Interview Highlights On how 'artisanal' cobalt mines continue to operate in the DRC - despite being illegal The DRC produced approximately 74% of the world's cobalt in 2021. Some 20,000 people work at Shabara artisanal mine in the DRC, in shifts of 5,000 at a time.

Children and armed conflict report