The chances of your phone's battery being made using cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are, as this chart using data cited in ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ's DossierPlus 'Mining Industry in Africa' shows, very high.
The country, ranked 166 out of 180 countries on Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (with a score of just 20 out of a possible 100), and with an estimated one million people living in modern slavery as of 2018, also happens to be the world's largest producer of the metal key to lithium-ion battery production.
The use of child labor in the mining of cobalt in DRC is well documented, with the estimating that 40,000 children, some as young as 6 years old, work in the mines there.
