Blockchain Success Stories

Chapter 11. Everledger: Blockchain and the Supply Chain

We have so much wealth, yet we stay so poor. I can understand why you Americans say you don’t want to buy our diamonds. Instead of blessings, our diamonds bring us nothing but misfortune.¹

—Zacharie Mamba, head of mining, Tshikapa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Tshikapa is rich in diamonds. Sadly, many of the people who mine those diamonds are desperately poor.

Since these precious gems were discovered there in 1907, the small city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, located in south-central Africa, has become a mining hotspot. The growth of these mining operations was accompanied by appalling human rights violations: from child labor to violence and rape.

In a poverty-stricken country, wracked by years of civil war and rebel uprisings, discovering a single diamond can mean putting food on the table and getting much-needed medical help for a miner’s family. So the workers spend hours in back-breaking labor, sweating under the sweltering sun, hoping to find a single rough gem. When the surface mines tunnel underground, workers shovel gravel inside dark pits, always with the threat that the mine may collapse around them, burying them alive.

Time magazine reports from one of these mining sites:

Knee-deep in water pumped from the nearby river, three men sluice pans of gravel through small sieves.

[The miner] gives an excited yelp, fishes out a sliver of diamond the size of a peppercorn and hands it to an overseer sitting ...