European money to build a market that does not exist yet.
A grant from the European Partnership for Responsible Minerals, paying a consortium to turn a small book-and-claim credit scheme at one Congolese mine into a system other sites and other buyers can use. The credits are the mechanism; this is the money that builds it.
Read the project page at EPRMA grant aimed at the plumbing, not the pilot.
Artisanal and industrial cobalt are usually mixed long before anyone downstream sees them, so a buyer who wants to support responsible artisanal production often cannot buy it physically. Book-and-claim is the workaround borrowed from renewable energy: a credit is issued for each tonne verifiably produced to an agreed standard at a partner cooperative, a company buys credits to match the cobalt it uses, and the premium goes back to the site.
That mechanism already existed in a small way before this grant, created by the Fair Cobalt Alliance and first sold in 2023. What EPRM funded in 2024 is the next problem: making it repeatable. In the consortium’s words the project sets out to develop “a replicable and scalable” credit system and to digitise it, “enabling and incentivising compliance with international standards for responsible ASM”.
The work is anchored at one place. EPRM’s own description gives it “an initial focus on the Kamilombe mine situated just outside Kolwezi in DR Congo”, the artisanal copper-cobalt site worked by the CMDS cooperative. Revenue from credit sales flows into a mine improvement fund governed by the workers themselves, with a share committed to interventions centred on women, who do much of the mineral washing at the site.
What is on the public file.
From one site to a system.
Verify production
Establish what was produced responsibly, at which site, to a standard a downstream buyer can rely on — the step that has to be solid before a credit means anything.
Issue and sell credits
Connect downstream companies, who buy credits commensurate with the cobalt they consume, to upstream producers, who generate credits for each tonne verifiably produced.
Reinvest at the mine
Direct the revenue into a worker-governed improvement fund at the site, rather than into a programme decided elsewhere.
Active, and past the halfway mark.
The grant runs to February 2027 and the funder’s programme data, refreshed on 17 September 2026, shows it in implementation with most of the budget disbursed. EPRM published a project update in April 2026, and the Fair Cobalt Alliance reported independently in 2026 that credits purchased during 2025 were reinvested at Kamilombe. Own-channel activity and outside corroboration are both current, which is what this Hub requires before calling an initiative active.
One thing to read carefully: who holds this grant. EPRM’s project page names The Impact Facility as the applicant and does not name the Fair Cobalt Alliance; the alliance’s own report describes EPRM as having funded “the FCA and partners”. The alliance also describes The Impact Facility as its permanent secretariat, which explains the overlap without dissolving it. Both accounts are given here as their authors wrote them.
Scale is the honest caveat. The mechanism this grant is scaling remains early: buyer numbers are small, the public standard is not yet released, and the sums reinvested so far are modest against the size of artisanal production around Kolwezi. The project’s ambition is infrastructure, and infrastructure is judged later than a pilot is.
The consortium on the grant.
The applicant holds the grant; the others are named as project partners by EPRM, by the funder’s programme data, or by both.
The Impact Facility
Fairphone
Alliance for Responsible Mining
EPRMThe Fair Cobalt Alliance created the credit mechanism and reports on its results, and is named in that role rather than as a party to this grant. Datastake, which builds the registry the scheme runs on, discloses that it publishes this Hub.
More initiatives, mapped and tracked.
This grant is one of dozens of programmes shaping artisanal cobalt. Browse the full register, or tell us what is missing.