Following meetings in Kinshasa earlier this week, the Minister of Mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Martin Kabwelulu, has backed ITRI’s supply chain monitoring scheme aimed at identifying the sources of tin ore mined in the country’s eastern provinces. The project is seen to fit well with the DRC government’s plans to work with the UN peacekeeping force MONUC in establishing secure trading centres in the Kivu provinces

In a letter to the head of the ITRI delegation, Kay Nimmo, the minister praised ITRI’s “progressive and constructive approach  and promised that the ministry’s own experts would contribute to the development and implementation of “a system to check the supply chain that meets the requirements of the international community. The ITRI Tin Supply Chain Initiative (iTSCi) was launched in July and aims to ensure that revenue from tin sales does not benefit armed groups.

The minister also asked Amalgamated Metal Corporation and Traxys to resume tin ore purchases in the country, which has been suspended from September and July respectively. Yenga Mabolia, an government’s special adviser on mining, told Bloomberg: “The minister asked the companies to reconsider their position. He said to them, ‘We can work together. We can deal with the problems together.