Originally written in English
Congo’s core challenge is not simply extractive capacity. It is whether the country can convert mineral dominance into value retention, industrial leverage, and governable supply chain power before the current window closes.
Start with a single structural fact: China refined 77 percent of the world's cobalt in 2022. Almost all of it came from Congolese mines. This is the core of the DRC's supply chain problem. Not the roads, not the ports, not even the conflict, though all of these are real constraints. The problem is that the value-adding steps that transform raw ore into battery precursor, and battery precursor into industrial leverage, happen somewhere else. The DRC supplies the risk. The world captures the reward.
This asymmetry has been visible for a decade. What has changed is that the world's largest economies have finally decided it is their problem to fix, because they need what Congo has. That shift creates genuine strategic openings. It also creates a new category of mistake: organisations that confuse diplomatic momentum for structural change, and position themselves accordingly.
The Export Ban That Changed the Conversation
In February 2025, cobalt prices hit a nine-year low. Structural oversupply, driven in large part by an extraordinary output surge at CMOC's Tenke Fungurume and Kisanfu operations that lifted the company's global cobalt market share from 24 percent to 41 percent in a single year, had crushed the revenues of a country that depends on mineral exports to fund basic public services. Kinshasa's response was bold and, for the continent, unprecedented: a blanket export ban on cobalt.
The ban ran for eight months. When it was replaced in October 2025, it was replaced not by open markets but by a quota system capping annual shipments at 96,600 tonnes for 2026 and 2027, roughly half of 2024 export volumes. A new regulatory body, ARECOMS, was established with broad authority over all strategic minerals. Cobalt hydroxide prices had risen 245 percent from their February lows by the time the quota system took effect. S&P Global projects the quota will move the market into structural deficit through 2027.
The quota system represents a fundamental shift from market-based supply to government-controlled allocation, giving the DRC unprecedented leverage over global cobalt prices.
CRU Group, quoted by market analysts, 2025Whether that leverage converts into durable value retention is a separate, harder question. The DRC currently has no active cobalt refining capacity, which means resource nationalism remains a tool for price influence rather than industrial transformation. Battery manufacturers are accelerating their shift to LFP chemistries containing no cobalt at all; LFP batteries already represented 40 percent of global EV installations in 2024. Indonesia, which produced over 30,000 tonnes of cobalt as a by-product of nickel processing in 2024, is increasing output to fill the supply gap. The window to convert market dominance into onshore processing infrastructure is real, but it will not stay open indefinitely.
Three Signals Worth Taking Seriously
In December 2025, the US and DRC signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement granting American investors preferential access to copper, cobalt, zinc, and gold. The most significant Western reengagement with Congolese mineral corridors in two decades, concluded alongside a US-brokered DRC-Rwanda peace accord.
A $9 billion US government-backed Orion-Glencore consortium is acquiring a 40 percent stake in two major copper-cobalt operations. EU feasibility studies for an onshore cobalt processing plant are underway under the Global Gateway strategy. The direction of travel is toward in-country value addition.
ARECOMS has mandated electronic mineral tracking through the Better Sourcing Program. The DRC has designated eastern mining sites as "red zones," suspending untraceable mineral trading. The data architecture for a more governable supply chain is, at last, being built.
Most supply chain strategies being drafted right now will be wrong within 18 months. Here is why.
- Your cobalt sourcing model assumes open-market pricing. ARECOMS quotas have structurally changed that assumption, and the timeline for re-establishing full supply is not clear.
- Your due diligence framework was built for stable governance zones. The eastern DRC is not one, and the traceability requirements under EU CSDDD will treat that as your liability, not Kinshasa's.
- Your conflict-risk assessment treats M23 as a security question. It is actually a supply chain integrity question: the same corridors handle both licit and illicit mineral flows.
- Your food-system or development programs are funded as humanitarian response. They are structurally supply chain investment problems, and are drastically underfunded as a result.
If two or more of these apply to your organisation, the analysis below is directly relevant to how you should reframe your strategy. So is the conversation at the bottom of this page.
When Geopolitics Obscures the Governance Problem
The US-DRC strategic partnership has attracted scrutiny as well as capital. Civil society organisations have noted that the agreement was concluded at speed during an active armed conflict, and that it embeds preferential US mineral access into the DRC's peace architecture in ways that constrain Kinshasa's future policy options. The government decree suspending artisanal mineral processing centres that followed the SPA's signing, affecting livelihoods across a sector supporting more than 10 million people, illustrated how rapidly international strategic agreements can translate into community-level disruption without adequate consultation or transition planning.
This tension is not peripheral to the supply chain story. It is structural to it. The M23 insurgency, backed by Rwanda and having seized Goma in January 2025 and Bukavu in February, still holds significant territory in North and South Kivu and has exploited the same governance vacuums that every supply chain reform agenda claims to address. UN reporting attributes the illicit export of at least 150 metric tonnes of coltan in 2024 to M23-controlled operations. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime concluded that peace processes which leave the illicit economies sustaining conflict intact are structurally unable to hold.
Peace negotiations between Kinshasa and Rwanda have produced the Washington Accords and the Doha framework, both signed in late 2025. Both have experienced immediate compliance challenges. The US imposed sanctions on four Rwandan military officials and the Rwanda Defence Force as an entity in March 2026, citing violations of the Washington Accords. The institutional architecture for peace and for a legitimate supply chain are the same architecture, and it does not yet exist in the eastern DRC at the scale required.
Food Systems: The Supply Chain Crisis No One Is Financing
Mineral logistics dominate the external analysis of Congo. The food system receives a fraction of the attention and a fraction of the investment, despite the magnitude of the failure. IPC analysis for July to December 2024 found 25.6 million Congolese, roughly a quarter of the population, facing crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. By early 2026, FAO and WFP projected that figure rising to 28 million. In the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, and Tanganyika, one in three people faces crisis-level hunger or worse.
The mechanism is well documented. Conflict displaces farmers, destroys infrastructure, breaks market connectivity, and triggers food price surges. FAO data for 2024 found that 35 percent of affected households in eastern DRC farmed less cropland than the year before; 25 percent reported livestock losses. WFP was forced to reduce the number of people it assists, from roughly one million at the start of 2025 to 600,000 by November, as funding fell to approximately $150 million against a stated need of $350 million.
The DRC has the land and water to achieve food self-sufficiency. The constraint is that supply chains connecting farm to market in conflict-affected provinces have ceased to function as coherent systems. Treating this as a humanitarian emergency, rather than a structural supply chain and development investment failure, produces entirely different and substantially less adequate policy and financing responses. Organisations that fund it as the former, and expect the outcomes of the latter, are setting themselves up for persistent underperformance.
What a Strategy Adequate to This Situation Looks Like
Two things are simultaneously true. The geopolitical moment is genuinely exceptional: for the first time, the world's largest economies are competing for access to Congolese minerals, and Kinshasa has leveraged that competition into a strategic partnership, a peace process, and the beginnings of a domestic processing agenda. And the structural constraints are genuinely deep: a conflict economy in the east that finances itself through illicit mineral trade, an absence of refining capacity that means resource nationalism produces price signals without value retention, and a food system in active collapse. A strategy adequate to this situation must operate across the geopolitical, institutional, and humanitarian registers simultaneously. Strategies that address only the mineral corridor, or only the logistics gap, or only the conflict, are partial responses to a systems problem. That is where most organisations currently are.
The DRC's supply chain future will be determined less by which agreements are signed in Washington or Doha than by whether the governance infrastructure to enforce them gets built on the ground. The institutions that treat that work with the seriousness it deserves will be better positioned in corridors that are becoming central to the global industrial transition. The question is whether your organisation is one of them.
If this analysis is useful, the deeper work is where the real value is.
Most of what we do doesn't end up as a blog post. It's scoping the assumptions behind a client's sourcing strategy, stress-testing a due diligence framework against conflict economy realities, or helping a development organisation reframe a program that's structured as relief but needs to function as supply chain investment. If any of that is relevant to what your organisation is facing, I'd like to hear about it.
Sources: US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries: Cobalt (2025) · Benchmark Mineral Intelligence / Cobalt Institute, Cobalt Market Report 2024 (May 2025) · Fastmarkets, DRC Cobalt Export Quotas (September 2025) · S&P Global Market Intelligence, DRC Cobalt Export Quotas to Support Cobalt Prices (October 2025) · New America, The DR Congo's Cobalt Power Move (2025) · Chemistry World, Congo's Cobalt Conundrum (December 2025) · European Parliament Research Service, Will the EU Help Build a Cobalt Refinery in the DRC? (2024) · WFP, DRC Emergency Overview (2025–2026) · FAO / WFP, IPC Acute Food Insecurity Analysis: DRC July 2024–June 2025 · Atlantic Council, Illicit Mineral Supply Chains Fuel the DRC's M23 Insurgency (November 2025) · International Crisis Group, The M23 Offensive: Elusive Peace in the Great Lakes (December 2025) · Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, Goma One Year On (January 2026) · Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2025) · CSIS, Critical Minerals, Fragile Peace: The DRC-Rwanda Deal (2025) · US Department of State, US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement (December 2025) · Security Council Report, Briefing on Energy, Critical Minerals and Security (March 2026) · ROAPE, The Price of Peace: US Strategy and the DRC's Critical Minerals (February 2026) · The Exchange Africa, Inside the $9bn US-Backed Critical Minerals Deal in the DRC (2026) · Public Citizen, Critical Minerals and Contested Sovereignty (February 2026)