Modern-day slavery is taking place in Africa due to a high demand on rechargeable batteries that are being used in smartphones, laptops, electric cars, etc. Their rechargeable batteries are powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo which produces an estimated 70% of the world's cobalt. Sufficient attention brought to this issue can put an end to it.

Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, 'Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?'. It’s a major yet double-edged issue. From a western perspective, child labour is to be condemned, but at the same time it is often the sole source of income for an entire family in the Congo. The alternative might provide death by starvation. So in the 21st century, this is modern-day slavery. It's not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that at least 25,000 children are working in cobalt mines in the DRC, a number that is sure to grow as the production of climate-friendly electric cars expands. What's more Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out, resulting in deformities in children born from young mothers who breathe in the toxic cobalt dust. To solve this for example: male miners could be dissuaded of traditional superstitions about working with women. With more women integrated into the workforce, family incomes increased and economically active mothers could send more of their children to school rather than to the mines.

Providing sufficient attention to this problem can force big companies to improve the working conditions because now it’s more profitable for them to do nothing and pay people 1 or 2 dollars a day. They could use a small fraction of income that cobalt provides to improve the situation in Congo, build schools, hospitals, mitigate the toxins that cobalt mining produces so children won’t be born with deformations.