The formalisation pilot that closed in 2020.
Between 2018 and 2020, mine owner Chemaf, trader Trafigura and the NGO Pact ran an artisanal cobalt formalisation project near Kolwezi: a fenced, mechanised zone where thousands of accredited miners worked more safely. It was suspended in 2020 and never relaunched.
Trafigura’s project page View its entry in the sector dataFormalising an informal site, at scale.
Mutoshi sat on a Chemaf copper-cobalt concession on the edge of Kolwezi, where the COMIAKOL cooperative had mined informally for over twenty years. The pilot gave that cooperative official, supervised access to a delineated zone and used machinery to strip overburden, replacing the deadly deep, unsupported tunnels of informal digging with shallow open pits no more than ten metres deep.
Each partner had a role: Chemaf supplied the site, machinery, geology and an on-site doctor and bought the ore; Trafigura funded the work, set the standards and offtook the cobalt; Pact ran delivery on the ground; Kumi Consulting audited against Trafigura’s responsible-sourcing expectations; and the state service SAEMAPE provided monitoring and the licence to operate.
The pilot also had a commercial side: a traceable, lower-risk ASM cobalt stream for Trafigura, built into a cobalt-hydroxide marketing agreement that ran to the end of 2020.
Ended in 2020, with lessons for later projects.
The official reasons were COVID-19 and the 2019 creation of EGC, the state monopoly that removed the legal basis for a private trader to buy artisanal cobalt directly. But several researchers argue the deeper driver was industrialisation: Chemaf always intended to convert Mutoshi into an industrial mine, and artisanal miners were tolerated only until the processing plant was ready.
Follow-up research found that ending the pilot brought more accidents, more child labour and reduced female participation, with miners returning to deep informal tunnels on the same ground. One structural lesson stands out: formalisation projects sited on industrial concessions are inherently time-limited. Mutoshi is profiled here as a pilot that has ended.
The industrial mine those miners were displaced for has stalled: Chemaf fell into financial distress, its planned sale to Norinco collapsed under Gécamines’ objection in 2025, and Virtus Lloyds Minerals Holding completed its purchase of the group in March 2026, per Lloyds Metals and Energy’s own filing, which describes Mutoshi as under construction; Semafor reported in July 2026 that the company remained out of production, Etoile still shut and Mutoshi still unfinished. The ground of the former pilot site has reverted to deep informal shafts.
Launch to closure.
- 2018
The pilot launches; Chemaf opens supervised access to COMIAKOL, Trafigura funds, Pact implements.
- 2019
Scale-up to roughly 2,700 miners on peak days. The cobalt price crashes, squeezing miner incomes; an independent socio-economic study reports strong gains, especially for women.
- 2020
Chemaf closes the site in March for COVID-19; in November Trafigura signs a five-year offtake with the new state monopoly EGC; on 21 December Trafigura announces the pilot has formally ended.
- 2022
Trafigura and TDB arrange about US$600M of financing for Chemaf to build Etoile and an industrial Mutoshi mine; the artisanal pilot is not relaunched.
- 2024
Chemaf, in financial distress with roughly US$900M of debt, agrees to sell Etoile and Mutoshi to China’s Norinco for about US$1.4bn. Creditors include Trafigura.
- 2025
The DRC and Gécamines withhold approval over the 2015 leases; the Norinco deal collapses in March, and Chemaf moves to halt copper-cathode production.
- 2026
Virtus Lloyds Minerals Holding, a US-backed venture with India’s Lloyds Metals and Energy, completes its acquisition of the whole Chemaf group; Lloyds’ filing of 30 March describes Etoile as operating and Mutoshi as under construction.
- 2026
Semafor reports in July that the company remains out of production, Etoile still shut and Mutoshi still unfinished — a different account of the same site.
A safer site, by design.
A fenced, mechanised zone
Access limited to verified COMIAKOL members; machinery stripped overburden so miners worked shallow open pits.
Accreditation and age control
Members were registered and verified over 18; child labour was excluded from the controlled site, with random alcohol testing.
PPE, water and a clinic
Protective equipment, clean water and sanitation, and an on-site doctor treating injuries, malaria and disease.
Better roles for women
The pilot moved women out of the lowest-paid washing work into higher-paid digging and team-lead roles.
The pilot in numbers.
Figures from the Trafigura-commissioned 2019 study and Pact’s case study. COMIAKOL had around 5,000 members; on-site daily numbers reached about 2,700. A specific production tonnage was not published. The US$1M-per-1,000-miners figure is the study’s own “rough estimate”; the 39% women figure is the surveyed project group, against a 45% off-site comparator.
A trader, a mine owner and an NGO.
A bilateral, single-site, single-offtaker pilot that ran 2018–2020; there is no continuing partnership. Funding flowed from Trafigura and was tied to its commercial offtake; Gécamines was the underlying landowner but not an operating partner.
COMIAKOL = Coopérative Minière et Artisanale de Kolwezi.
Its connections across the sector
Every organisation and site the sector data connects to it, grouped by the kind of link. Each name opens its own page, with the dates and sources of the link.