Two entrepreneurs have turned to the blockchain to build a platform that will enable businesses to curb child labour, environmental devastation, and the financing of armed conflict in their supply chain processes.

Dorae Inc. is running a pilot of a blockchain solution for the coltan and cobalt provenance under the tagline “the blockchain for raw materials”. The blockchain solution is Ethereum-based and will track the journey of a mineral from its source to the end user. The company aims to make companies more responsible with its global supply chain tracking solution that can be used for anything such as smartphones to electric cars.

Referring to their solution as one that is expected to “revolutionise the global market for these materials”, Dorae has kicked off its first pilot in DR Congo with the backing of the country’s president, Joseph Kabila. The pilot project is currently tracking cobalt and coltan from three mines in the DRC. The two minerals are used in items such as laptops, phones and electric vehicles. If the pilot becomes successful in the utilisation of blockchain technology to the secure transmission of mining supply chain data, it will help to eliminate the child labour cloud that has been hanging over the DRC’s cobalt and coltan mining industry. The Central African country, which is a hotspot for mineral mining, has been plagued by armed conflict coupled with a poor record of human rights issues including child labour.

Application of Blockchain Technology

The blockchain solution is expected to help by making it possible for all involved parties to record information about the origin, transit and processing of the raw materials into finished goods. All the stakeholders involved – companies, consumers and financiers – will have insight regarding the origin of the material and its full journey.

Speaking to Global Trade Review, Dorae’s Co-founder, Aba Schubert said, “The highest value of blockchain is addressing the disconnect in the information that’s needed in one end of the supply chain and the information that exists at the other end. That’s why we decided to start our project in DR Congo because there is information on the ground that end-users need, particularly US manufacturers who have actual regulatory requirements to conduct diligence on their supply chains, but it gets lost along the way.”

Partnerships with Governments and Businesses

Santos Silva, Dorae’s other co-founder, stated that the company needs to work with governments as a way of them standing out from their competitors. The two co-founders believe their platform could benefit different governments by giving them a tool that they can use to manage the information collected from their mines while empowering them to fight child labour and tax evasion issues.

Schubert went on to add: “We do not work against governments, we do not work independently from them, we work with them. Instead of just running our business on a private basis, we went and showed them our project, to get their blessing.” This was witnessed when the DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila met with Dorae in person and gave his approval.

Although the blockchain-based solution by Dorae could potentially curb human rights abuses, environmental exploitation, as well as regional conflict, the company’s founders, are tackling the issue from a business-focused viewpoint as companies associated with such issues could experience huge legal, financial and reputational repercussions.

Schubert went on to say: “We are not an NGO, we are not going in scolding people and telling them they should not do business this way or that. We are saying ‘here is a way you can do it and be economically compensated for the effort that that involves, and this is a system to get that information from A to B’.”

The end goal is to have firms rewarded by the end-consumer for maintaining proper standards. This is one of the key reasons that Dorae expects to get support from different companies in the supply chain industries as each has “an incentive to preserve that information”. The company is expected to target all supply chain stakeholders from both small to large-scale miners, processors and distributors as well as large international companies like Apple and Tesla.

How the Solution Will Work

According to Schubert, anyone can be onboarded to the platform as long as they have “good quality information”. Each material will have its own tailored dataset that will detail the information regarding the place of origin, amount and the state of material, time and location of the transaction, transaction individuals and the satisfaction of legal requirements. All data will be gathered and verified through partnerships with certification organisations, government inspectors, and NGOs.

Schubert said: “Our system takes the information, aggregates it at point of origin, loads it to blockchain. When a unit of material moves from the mine to the initial distributor, that sale is logged, and then when that distributor sells it to a processor, that sale is logged too. What the processor actually does to the material, that information gets logged, and so you get this immutable chain of information that is there as a pre-packed audit trail for the end-user.”

Lack of due diligence by supply chain companies is what commentators and academics have argued has contributed to the de facto embargo of minerals from the DRC leading to a weak economy. By making use of the blockchain, the platform will make it easier and cheaper for companies to prove their supply chains are responsible.

Schubert concluded by saying “financiers don’t want to get associated with it if there is some liability attached to it, and with this system, they can know that what they are financing is actually green mine-sourced.” While trade financiers are not their main focus at the moment, they will also be eventually added to the platform at some point in the near future.

Doare’s next milestone will be to increase the number of mines and raw materials and expand to additional countries. The startup is already in talks with specific countries in Africa and South America.