Appfrica Maps Coltan From Congo to Your Cell Phone

We all use coltan. In our cell phones, computers, the military uses it in weapons, it's everywhere. Except it exists in the earth (in abundance) in only a few places. The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of those places, and it's a major cause of the ongoing conflict there.

The globalized economy makes it difficult to identify exactly where all of the resources that we depend on come from, especially when they are invisible to us, buried in products that we use daily, but which look shiny and harmless on the outside.

Enter Appfrica Labs, which "facilitates and incubates technology entrepreneurs in East Africa." They created this map, which traces the mining of coltan from the Kivu area of DRC, through the hands of illegal traders in neighboring countries, to refinery plants in East Asia, to the products we buy from Apple, Nintendo, HP, Sony, Nokia, etc. (Many companies have pledged specifically not to source from DRC, but the smuggling of the mineral makes that hard to enforce.)

Appfrica made the map by combining data from reports on the mining of coltan (columbite and tantalite) and from Ushahidi (a crowd-sourced crisis information and mapping project based in Africa that also stepped up to start a site for Haiti after the earthquake). By mashing them together, it becomes clear that the heavily-mined areas are also the heavily-conflicted areas.