Second, weask respondents how they perceive the mining sectors’ impacts on their livesand community. DDP is associated with higher perceptions among women ofthe impact of the sector — specifically, their perceptions of mining’s impacts onaccess to clean water, health, and their lives generally

While 48% of mines in control clusters report visits from theFARDC in the last six months and 39% report illegal requests for “taxes”, only20% of mines in treated clusters report recent FARDC presence and 14% reportrequests for taxes

We find no indication that DDP mines are more productive or cancommand higher prices for their ore, so it seems unlikely that DDP mines canafford higher wages

ITSCI was formalized in 2011 and is nowactive in four countries, monitoring almost 2,500mining sites, of which over 1,200 pits are acrosseastern DRC,137 constituting a labour force of over35,000 miners.

In 2014 the cost of ITSCI implementation was estimated to bearound 2 to 4 % of the mineral export value. In 2019, the traceability costs were estimated betweenUSD130 to USD180 per ton.133 More recently, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, consider that thecharges they have to meet to comply with the ITSCI) certification mechanism are too high. They pay theequivalent of 82% of the cost of the organisation’s traceability system, principally for the labelling ofsacks of ore, compared with 18% for foreign buyers. Yet it is the buyers who obtain most of the profitfrom the sale of the ores

While this partnership made it easier to implement and manage theiTSCi closed supply chain, the sale of minerals to a single entity likeMMR/CDMC created a monopsony situation to the detriment of theminers (Matthysen and Montejano, 2013; Johnson, 2013). Thus, thebargaining capacity of artisanal diggers over mineral price setting wasdramatically reduced. As a result, diggers often violently opposed theMMR/CDMC’s price-setting policies (Wakenge, 2017).

Today, the ITSCI programme largely dominates the DRC mining sites at such a level that it benefits froma monopsony situation, in which, miners can only sell 3T minerals to ITSCI if they want to enter in thelegal supply chain. More options would accelerate and facilitate the access to a legal supply chain, butalso give more power to artisanal miners to negotiate the value of their production, the selling pricehaving a demonstrated important influence on their revenue.

First, iTSCi, which remains the only legal way of sourcing 3 T minerals fromeastern DRC by 2015, created a transnational monopsony through the bot-tleneck position of smelters, effectively de-linking local pricing from worldmarket prices. This increases transaction costs for upstream stakeholders:while transnational businesses manage to buy at artificially lowered prices(iTSCi charges its operational cost on members), miners, cooperatives, andmiddlemen bear the brunt. With the imposition of prices, the economic turn-over of artisanal miners eventually declines. In addition, without comple-mentary livelihood projects that make up for the loss of informal solidarityand pre-financing arrangements (that used to provide a basis for economicactivity in the “informal” scheme), formalisation inevitably reduces livelihoodoptions,

towards formalization of theartisanal mining sector in eastern DRC has been the emergence of buying monopolies atthe local level. Only comptoirs meeting the standards of the Itsci traceability schemehave been able to get their minerals sold to Western end-users in the 3T industry, andthis has given them the power to unilaterally impose certain conditions on theirsuppliers.

While they includearound 40 mining sites, the overwhelming majority (over 900 sites in South Kivu alone) continueto await traceability or certification systems that would allow them to regain legal access to globalmarkets.