Roadmap for increasing the Congolese mining industry involvement in the local community development

Abstract

Abstract The mining sector revenues of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have significantly increased proportionally to mining production. Unfortunately, the increase in mining production has not translated into benefits for affected communities, given that revenues have not been sufficiently invested in the fostering of economic diversification or oriented toward projects that can sustain economic growth and thus improve the population’s socioeconomic status and welfare. The Mining Code revision of 2018 was supposed to tackle these problems and has not yet come to fruition. Moreover, it is a common fact that mining has failed to alleviate poverty in some mineral resource-rich countries of the Sub-Saharan Africa, a region to which the DRC belongs. This work aims at increasing the mining industry involvement in the development of local communities. It analyses the behaviour in the production of copper and cobalt over more than a century and its incidence on the country economic status and the population welfare, as reflected by evolution in the Gross Domestic Product and the Human Development Index. It addresses the issue of mining and the development of local communities and finds that their welfare needs to be improved. The work puts an emphasis on the effective implementation of the new Mining Code and presents a framework for increasing the mining industry involvement in the welfare of affected communities.