‘Artisanal’ mining is now the country’s leading profession — attracting adults and children alike. Chinese investment is driving its growth.
KOLWEZI, Congo — Patrick Bwana strains his body as he thrusts a full-sized shovel into a patch of rocky ground. He is 12 years old. He looks 9. He speaks with his eyes fixed on the ground. “I used to go to school, but my father died, and no one paid for my studies anymore,” he says.
Bwana works from around 6 in the morning to about 3 in the afternoon, lugging around bags of rock that seem to weigh as much as he does. He says he can earn $5,000 francs a day doing this. That’s about $5. He hopes he can save enough to pay his own school fees, and return to school.
Bwana is one of tens of thousands of child laborers estimated to work in Congo’s mineral sector. Most take to the work out of necessity, to help their parents earn enough to feed their family. Child labor is illegal in the Congo, as is much of the artisanal mining that takes place in and around Kolwezi on mineral reserves owned or leased by foreign or Congolese companies.
The forces that shape Congo’s artisanal mining sector are many: A worldwide demand for copper and other base minerals for manufacturing; the inability of many Congolese to find any other sort of lucrative work; the absence of government regulation. But ask any Kolwezi miner who’s responsible, and you’re likely to hear just one answer: “The Chinese.”
Read the full story at GlobalPost or NPR, or at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which provided funding for the project.
In Africa’s fastest-growing city, a new haven for Congo’s wealthy burdens some of its poor.
KINSHASA, Congo — On one side of the water, hand-carved wooden canoes navigate the marshy canals of a crowded fishing village. Unpainted cement houses line muddy dirt streets where women sit at stands, selling the day’s catch.
On the other side, where the fishermen used to cast their nets, a posh private city is being raised from the bottom of the Congo River. Pumping millions of cubic meters of sand, the British hedge fund Hawkwood Properties is developing 1600 acres of water to become a tranquil residential haven complete with swimming pools, schools, grocery stores and a sports complex.
A more striking portrayal of income disparity in Congo than Kinshasa’s Cite du Pecheur (Fisherman’s City) and the upcoming La Cite du Fleuve, (City of the River), would be difficult to come by. But Hawkwood’s private development is a logical progression of life in Africa’s fastest-growing city.
See the full story and video at GlobalPost. This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The earthquake that struck Haiti three years ago this month sent a concrete wall crashing down onto the 30-year-old dancer Fabienne Jean. Her right leg was crushed and had to be amputated. When Fabienne danced again, she was hailed as a symbol of Haiti’s post-earthquake recovery.
But as reporter Jacob Kushner discovered, the quest to rebuild one woman’s life would take much more than that. Kushner followed Fabienne’s story for nearly a year, reporting from Port-au-Prince, Boston and New York. Listen to the five-part series and see photos by Nick Kozak at wlrn.org.
At a factory in the Dominican Republic, workers are sewing UW apparel, providing for their families, and spreading hope that the global textile industry can change.
During an age in which nearly all clothing sold in the United States is made in developing countries by workers who are paid just pennies an hour, Alta Gracia Apparel is not your typical textile factory: its employees earn three times the nation’s minimum wage of $150 per month. They get health insurance, a pension, vacation days, and maternity leave. They sit in ergonomic chairs and drink water that they themselves have quality-tested for pathogens.
It’s hard to fathom that a decade ago, many of these same people produced hats for a company that paid them just eighty-four cents an hour, forced them to work overtime without extra pay, and sometimes verbally and physically abused them.
See the full article and photos that were published in the Winter 2012 edition of On Wisconsin Magazine.
CJR, in collaboration with Columbia’s Tow Center for digital journalism, covered the Nov. 6, 2012 election coverage. Seven student journalists from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism watched and read the coverage, working with CJR editors to report on digital innovation and integration of social media by news outlets as they presented election results. Their analysis ran in real-time on this live blog.
Jacob Kushner covered the cable TV networks and published these seven posts during election night.
Why Sudan’s economic problems – not its political ones – may pose the greatest threat to al-Bashir’s regime.
For thirty years almost without pause, governments in Khartoum – the capital of Sudan — have fought against their own people. The North-South civil war, which killed an estimated two million people and displaced four million more, ostensibly ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that allowed for the ethnically diverse South to succeed last year from the Arab-controlled North. But even if that conflict reignites as recent fighting indicates it might, the Sudanese government is now facing a new and even harder-to-combat opponent: its own people in the Northern cities which the government has long counted on for support.
Read the full story as it appeared at the Foreign Report.
Despite a problematic track record, US continues to award multimillion dollar contracts to the DC firm.
NEW YORK — Two years ago, auditors revealed the Washington, DC, consulting firm Chemonics International and a partner company were employing only one-third as many Haitians as their contract required to clear rubble left by the January 2010 earthquake from city streets as part of the US government-funded “Cash for Work” program.
Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post.
Riches beckon from beneath Haiti’s hills, and mining companies are hoping to lock in huge tax breaks to get at them.
Deep in Haiti’s northern mountains, a half-dozen supervisors at a mining exploration site spent their days playing dominoes at a folding table next to a helicopter pad. For weeks they waited in La Miel, off a dirt road deep in the countryside, for Haiti’s government to give them the go-ahead to search for the gold they believe is buried in the hills around them.
Read the full story as it appeared at Guernica.