Back to School: why a classroom in Kolwezi changes everything
In September, our children go back to school. The uniforms are bought, the shoes no longer fit, and somewhere in the house there is a list of things we were supposed to buy a fortnight ago.
In Kolwezi, September arrives differently. Thousands of children will spend it working.
What is happening in Kolwezi
Kolwezi sits at the centre of the world's cobalt supply. Around two thirds of global cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a significant share of it is dug not by machines but by hand, in what is known as artisanal and small scale mining.
An estimated 40,000 children work in the cobalt mines of the former Katanga region. They dig, they wash ore, they carry sacks. They use basic tools and have no protective equipment. According to the Good Shepherd International Foundation, which has worked in these communities for over a decade, they earn less than a dollar a day, which is not enough to survive on, and in the process they lose their rights to protection, healthcare and education.
That cobalt ends up in the batteries of the phones, laptops and electric cars that the rest of us use without thinking about it.
Why school is the thing that works
It would be reasonable to ask why a charity concerned with child labour spends its money on school fees rather than on rescue.
The answer is that a school place is the most reliable way to keep a child out of a pit. A child who is on a register, in a uniform, in a classroom from morning until afternoon, is a child who is not underground. School is not a nice addition to the work of ending child labour. It is the mechanism.
It also changes what happens next. A child who completes an education has options that a child who spent those years mining does not. Ending child labour for one generation means giving that generation a way to earn a living that does not involve sending their own children down a hole.
But getting a child into school is the easy half. Keeping them there is the hard half. When a household's income disappears, school is the first thing to be sacrificed, because a child at a desk is a child not earning. That is why our work is measured in school years rather than school days, and why we ask supporters for a monthly gift rather than a one off donation.
Who does the work: Bon Pasteur
We do not run schools ourselves. We are a small UK charity, and we believe the work should be done by people who live where the work is.
In Kolwezi, that is Bon Pasteur, the local development partner affiliated with the Good Shepherd sisters. Together with the Good Shepherd International Foundation, Bon Pasteur has been working in the artisanal mining communities around Kolwezi since 2013, in an isolated and underserved area known as Domaine Marial.
What is striking about their approach is how little of it is about mining. Their model brings together education, alternative livelihoods and social protection, and over the years it has reached close to 35,000 people across eight artisanal mining communities.
In practice that looks like:
The Bon Pasteur Centre, opened in 2019, providing primary education and child protection in a safe environment, alongside work with parents and the wider community on children's rights and positive parenting.
ChaKuishi, meaning Food for Life, a women's social enterprise in agriculture and fish farming. Most women in these communities have had no education and few ways to earn outside the mines, which leaves them exposed to exploitation. ChaKuishi builds an income that does not depend on cobalt.
A mobile clinic, monitoring the health of women, mothers and newborns, and referring serious cases to hospital.
This is what a serious answer to child labour looks like. You cannot take a child out of a mine and leave the family that needed the income exactly as you found it. Bon Pasteur works on the school place and the household at the same time, which is why it holds.
Our partnership
The Freedom and Justice Partnership wants to fund and support this work, and to make the case for it here in the UK.
We raise money in Britain and send it to the people already doing the work in Kolwezi, rather than building a parallel operation of our own. We also campaign for supply chain reform, because pulling children out one at a time will never empty the mines. The companies buying this cobalt can be made to account for who mined it, and until they are, there will always be another child to rescue.
The Back to School appeal
This September, as our own children return to their classrooms, we want to see 50 more children in Kolwezi in theirs.
Not 50 children helped for a week. Fifty children on a register for a full school year.
£18 a month covers one child's schooling for a year. Fees, materials, and a safe place to be all day. It is roughly the price of two coffees a week, and it is the difference between a pit and a desk for one particular child.
Fifty children means fifty people willing to give £18 a month. If you would like to be one of them, you can set it up in two minutes.
If a monthly gift is not right for you, a one off gift at the same link goes just as far. And if you cannot give at all, sharing this does more than you would guess. Most people genuinely do not know where the cobalt in their phone comes from. Telling them is the beginning of everything else.
All gifts are used where the need is greatest, guided by these figures.
The Freedom and Justice Partnership is a UK registered charity, no. 1214382. Read more about Bon Pasteur and the Good Shepherd International Foundation's work in DR Congo at gsif.it.