Éric Kalala, Director General of Entreprise Générale du Cobalt, the Congolese state entity holding an exclusive mandate over the purchase, transformation, and commercialisation of strategic minerals from artisanal sources — cobalt, tantalum, and germanium — outlined EGC's operational framework and ten-year vision in a recent interview, describing a structured transition from informal artisanal mining toward small-scale enterprise ownership.
Kalala stated that artisanal cobalt production represents between 2% and 20% of total Congolese output, with the DRC accounting for approximately 75% of global cobalt production — making the country's artisanal sector the world's second-largest cobalt source after the DRC's own industrial operators, and directly or indirectly involving more than two million people. EGC recently produced its first 1,000 traceable and certified tonnes of artisanal cobalt, which Kalala described as an initial step toward a proof of concept that the company is working to establish at broader scale. EGC operates a dual site model: greenfield sites where the company conducts drilling and 3D deposit visualisation before artisanal miners begin extraction, reducing the physical burden of their work to picking, and brownfield sites where existing non-compliant operations are progressively brought to standard through an evolutionary compliance pathway.
On local processing, Kalala confirmed that EGC's mandate encompasses transformation as well as purchasing and commercialisation. Current output includes copper cathodes and cobalt hydroxide, with the company working toward advancing further along the processing chain on cobalt and moving rapidly on tantalum transformation. New project announcements in the transformation segment are expected within months. EGC's ten-year vision, as articulated by Kalala, is the elimination of artisanal mining as a category — replaced by formalised small-scale mining cooperatives constituted as legal entities under OHADA corporate standards, with artisanal workers transitioning into mine entrepreneurs.
