A registry of the initiatives, programmes and pilots working to improve ASM cobalt, with their lead organisations, location and status. Filter by focus or status, search by name.
Industry initiative behind RMAP facility assessments, the RMI Public List and the reporting tools used across minerals supply chains. Its former cobalt-specific refiner standard has migrated into today’s all-minerals assurance architecture. Explore its assurance system and searchable public membership roll.
Learn moreThe cobalt industry’s global trade association, registered in England and Wales since 1991. It coordinates REACH dossiers and industry positions, publishes the annual Cobalt Market Report, and in 2022 suspended the public reporting obligation of CIRAF, its assurance framework.
Learn moreSupply-chain-wide alliance mobilising investment to professionalise ASM cobalt, remove child labour and diversify community incomes. Its work includes on-site safety rules, protective equipment and child-labour removal at a partner cooperative mine in Kamilombe, and it is a partner, with the Centre for Child Rights & Business and Save the Children, in The Hub: Child Labour Remediation Network in Kolwezi, which provides education, stipends and psychosocial support through local CSOs.
Learn moreGIZ-implemented, industry- and EU-funded project working to show artisanal cobalt can meet health, safety and environmental standards. It trained cooperatives with SAEMAPE, ran a community programme in Kisote until early 2023, and since 2024 has supported EGC’s Tombolo pilot to the point of a final investment decision, still pending; its continuation provides technical assistance to early 2028. IMPACT and then Artisanact delivered its mining component.
Learn moreEPRM-funded framework digitising local information so ASM operators can manage risk, prove responsible sourcing and reach banking and global markets; runs on the Nashiriki, Hatua and KOTA apps.
Learn moreEuropean multi-stakeholder partnership funding artisanal mining projects in high-risk areas. Founded alongside the EU conflict-minerals regulation and opened to cobalt, copper and lithium in 2023, it now finances several of the projects mapped here. It publishes no legal form of its own and its grants are administered by the Dutch agency that holds its secretariat.
Learn moreA €320,000 EPRM grant, May 2024 to February 2027, to make a book-and-claim cobalt credit system replicable and to digitise it, anchored at the Kamilombe site. Credit revenue is directed by a worker-governed improvement fund at the mine. The funder shows it in implementation with 71% of the budget spent.
Learn moreA €479,830 EPRM project, October 2022 to June 2026, building worker-driven monitoring capacity at tin and cobalt mines and routing the findings into European public procurement, where a condition in a tender binds every bidder. Its term has passed and the funder still shows it in implementation, annotated as closing.
Learn morePublic-private platform (2020–2022) that co-developed the ASM Cobalt Framework to formalise DRC ASM cobalt and eradicate child labour; the work has since been graduated into the Responsible Minerals Initiative and CAP is no longer a standalone programme.
Learn moreAligns downstream and upstream company policies with OECD guidance; co-published the Cobalt Refiner standard.
Learn moreLSM-ASM formalisation pilot (~2,000+ accredited miners); suspended in March 2020 and not relaunched as the site went industrial. Operator Chemaf was acquired by Virtus Lloyds Minerals Holding, a US-backed venture with India’s Lloyds Metals & Energy, which completed its purchase of the group in March 2026 after a Chinese sale collapsed in 2025; Lloyds’ own filing describes Mutoshi as under construction, while Semafor reported in July 2026 that Chemaf remained out of production, with Mutoshi still unfinished.
Learn moreState monopoly mandated to buy and market all artisanal cobalt; began traceable production at Musompo in Nov 2025 and first exports via Lobito in Feb 2026. EGC reports over 4,125 t of cobalt produced and 2,731 t exported by end-April 2026 (its own unaudited figures); Fastmarkets reports 3,531 t of cobalt content exported in H1 2026 from DRC data it saw; its 2026 export quota is put at about 5,640 t by its CEO, who called it insufficient. Still a small share of national output. It has also signed a public-private MoU with ERG Africa to formalise responsible artisanal mining on an ERG exploitation area, and an MoU with Mercuria that aims to make the Kasulo ASM site a benchmark for responsible cobalt.
Learn moreTechnology-enabled continuous monitoring of human rights and health & safety on individual ASM cobalt sites. Recent evidence is self-reported or partner-reported (low external visibility).
Learn moreOpen mapping of artisanal mine sites in eastern DRC, and the Kufatilia incident-monitoring system, extended into the cobalt province of Lualaba in 2023, plus cobalt due-diligence and EU-regulation analysis.
Learn moreIndustry consortium for end-to-end blockchain cobalt traceability, since rebranded as a multi-mineral platform; primarily industrial and operating, though recent evidence is largely self-reported (low external visibility).
Visit siteILO project against child labour in the DRC’s cobalt mining, funded by the US Department of Labor, with Pact as implementing partner. It ran from October 2018 to May 2024; by Pact’s account it built the capacity of 44 cobalt-producing cooperatives and large-scale mining companies to prevent, identify and remediate child labour, and it set up private-sector working groups in Kolwezi, Likasi and Lubumbashi. The ILO calls GALAB its continuation.
Visit siteSuccessor to COTECCO; its DRC component launched in Nov 2024 to strengthen remediation for children identified through the CLMRS. ILO’s project page gives the project’s duration as 1 December 2021 to 27 March 2025, about four months after the DRC launch. Whether it closed on schedule or under the US Labor Department’s cancellation of about US$500 million in ILAB grants, which over 100 organisations protested in April 2025, is not established.
Visit siteGIZ project (January 2019 to April 2022) commissioned by Germany’s BMZ; one component supported mining cooperatives in implementing and evidencing standards in artisanal cobalt mining. GIZ lists project 2021.2072.3 as its follow-on, and Cobalt for Development kept a technical exchange with it.
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