European Partnership for Responsible Minerals (EPRM)

Bringing responsible sourcing to the artisanal mine.

EPRM is a partnership, not an agency: European governments, brand-name manufacturers and civil-society organisations sitting on one board, with a secretariat inside the Dutch government and a grant window pointed at artisanal mines in high-risk countries. Constituted in 2016 around conflict minerals, it opened its funding to cobalt, copper and lithium in 2023 — and several of the projects it now finances are in the Congolese copper-cobalt belt.

Visit europeanpartnership-responsibleminerals.eu

A partnership with a board, a secretariat and no legal body of its own.

EPRM was founded at the end of 2016 as a development-policy accompaniment to the EU’s conflict-minerals regulation: the regulation told European importers of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold what they had to prove, and EPRM was set up to help the mines at the far end of those chains become provable. It describes itself as “a multi-stakeholder initiative fostering reliable and responsible mineral supply chains through inclusive and knowledge-driven engagement with artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in high-risk areas.”

It is governed by a board drawn evenly from its three constituencies — governments and institutions, supply-chain actors, and civil-society organisations — with the chair and a share of the seats rotating each year. The European Commission’s DG INTPA, the OECD, the ICGLR and the World Bank sit as observers. The executive arm is a secretariat commissioned to the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, which runs the money, the memberships and the calls for proposals.

What it does not have is a legal form of its own. No registration, seat or statute for EPRM is published anywhere we could find, and its entire grant portfolio is reported to the international aid-transparency standard under the Dutch agency’s own chamber-of-commerce number rather than any EPRM identifier. Its funding is administered as a Dutch subsidy scheme, and membership applications go to an address at the agency. The partnership is real and its money is traceable; the body behind it is the agency that holds the pen.

Members pay in differently by constituency. Governments contribute money, and governments of producing countries may join as observers without paying. Companies pay annual fees scaled from €1,500 for a small enterprise to €30,000 for a strategic member. Civil-society members contribute 120 hours a year in kind, observers 48. Admission runs through a secretariat assessment, a circulation to the membership and a board decision.

Status

Active, and a decade old.

EPRM marked ten years in June 2026 with a conference in Amsterdam. Its own pages and news have carried updates through 2026, and the projects it funds are independently visible both in the reporting of the organisations that run them and in the Dutch agency’s published programme data, refreshed in September 2026. That is what puts it inside this Hub’s test for an active initiative.

The change that matters here is the 2023 call. EPRM was built around tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, and its Due Diligence Hub still is. But the 2023 call for proposals covered tin, tantalum, tungsten, lithium, natural graphite, cobalt, copper and nickel, and the projects that came out of it put EPRM money into the Congolese copper-cobalt belt for the first time. Four of its funded projects now touch cobalt; three of those are in, or partly in, the DRC.

What it does not publish is a budget. There is no annual figure, no donor breakdown and no accounts on its site. What can be traced is project by project, through the Dutch agency’s aid-transparency data: twenty-seven published grants between €163,379 and €800,000, coming to €10.57m in total. That sum is a floor and not a budget — it excludes four projects EPRM’s own site names and the agency’s programme does not carry, and it excludes secretariat costs.

Two things on its own site do not agree with each other, and this page carries neither as a figure. EPRM’s membership page says the partnership has more than fifty members, while the overview it publishes names forty-three organisations and five observers; the names are below, and the count is not. And how much of the world’s cobalt comes from artisanal mining is stated one way on its About page and another, lower way on its own 2024 page on energy-transition minerals, citing two named studies; with EPRM’s own material in disagreement, this Hub carries no figure for it.

Two project locations are contested the same way. EPRM places its CADD project in the DRC and Burkina Faso; the agency’s programme data places it in Burkina Faso and Bolivia. EPRM describes “Promoting Responsible Mineral Supply Chains” as a Ugandan project; the agency lists the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda. Both accounts are named here and neither is merged into the other.

Bringing responsible sourcing to the artisanal mine.

Artisanal cobalt miners at work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A partnership with a board, a secretariat and no legal body of its own.

One board, one secretariat, three constituencies.

The KOV open-pit copper-cobalt mine at Kolwezi.

The grant window, and the work around it.

It funds mine-site projects.

It equips companies to do due diligence.

It puts the two ends in a room.

Active, and a decade old.

The constituencies, and the bench of observers.

The funders behind the projects.