Men work at Makala gold mine camp near the town of Mongbwalu in Ituri province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, April 7, 2018. Picture taken April 7, 2018. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic/File Photo
A decade after being founded partly to give former combatants an alternative to armed conflict, a UK-based social enterprise is on the verge of its first commercial gold exports from one of the world’s most volatile mining regions. PeaceGold says it expects to begin shipping gold out of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s restive east by September, a milestone that would test whether ethical supply chains can take root in a region long dominated by smuggling and militia control.
“Congo doesn’t have a gold problem – it has a systems problem [and] we are trying to fix that,” said Greg Valerio, the organisation’s founder, who has spent years building what he describes as a regulated alternative to the country’s largely illicit artisanal gold trade. More than half of Congo’s gold is widely believed to leave the country through smuggling networks each year, depriving local communities and the state of substantial revenues.
PeaceGold was established in 2013 in partnership with the local nonprofit Conflict Resolution Center, with a mandate to bring structure to artisanal mining and draw former fighters into legitimate, regulated work as a means of reducing violence in the region. The initiative initially relied on Western donor funding before pivoting to a commercial model designed to make it self-sustaining.
The enterprise now works alongside roughly 11 artisanal mining cooperatives in Ituri Province, collectively representing close to 25,000 miners and support workers. However, its status as a nonprofit has presented structural challenges — under that arrangement, it is legally unable to trade the gold it helps produce, Valerio acknowledged.
To address this, PeaceGold is finalising regulatory approvals and operational systems needed for its commercial launch. It is also securing working-capital financing from a yet-to-be-named UK-based financial partner to fund gold purchases directly at mine sites.
The road to launch has not been without setbacks. Rwanda-backed M23 rebels and allied armed militias intensified their offensive across eastern Congo last year, seizing additional territory in a campaign that the United Nations said killed thousands of civilians. While PeaceGold’s partner cooperatives were not directly overrun, the violence forced some of them to temporarily suspend operations.
Valerio is tempering expectations about the scale of initial exports, projecting a gradual ramp-up that would peak at around 50 kilograms per month by the third year of operations. Central to the model is a commitment to keep approximately 80 percent of the gold’s value inside Congo — distributed among the cooperatives themselves, local infrastructure development, and the compliance systems underpinning the entire supply chain.
Eastern DRC sits atop vast mineral wealth, including significant gold deposits, yet decades of armed conflict, weak governance, and entrenched smuggling networks have prevented those resources from meaningfully benefiting local populations. PeaceGold’s ambition is to demonstrate that formalisation — rather than prohibition or extraction by outside interests — offers the most credible path toward stability and community benefit.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah