The miners are not just former rebels though; they are teachers, professors, students, teenagers and very young children. Diggers come from all over the country, and live with the risk of murder, poor health, and – for children – the likelihood that they will never get a chance to go to school.
And this grim reality becomes even harsher when you know that the DRC – recently jointly named as the least developed country in the world, along with Niger – is sitting on an estimated 15 trillion pounds of mineral wealth. The disparity of such a large presence of underground wealth on the one hand, compared to such extreme poverty on the other has caused conflicts in the past and there’s no doubt it is one of the reasons the people of the DRC are facing such a chaotic situation.
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