Global Case Study Overview:

For my Global Case Study, I decided to choose the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is located in central Africa. The DRC is the second-largest country in Africa and is home to over 100 million people making it the fourth most populated country on the continent. The DRC is famous for it's plethora of natural resources such as cobalt, copper, diamonds and more. Despite these high number of resources it is often considered to be one of the most impoverished countries in the world(Peter, 2022). Explotation from other countries, corporations, and it's own government have led to this poverty, human-rights violations and political instability.

Despite the DRC gaining independence from Belgium in 1960, there remains much conflict and poverty with no end in sight along with many unethical practices. A lot of work needs to be done in order to put the DRC in the right direction moving foward. A well-known model to make sure technology related practices are eithcal is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Code of Ethics. The Democratic Republic of the Congo violates two General Ethical principles which are ethical decision making and avoid harm.

These two ethical principles the DRC violates brings us into the main ethical dilemna going on. Cobalt is a resource of great abundance in the DRC, and cobalt is used for the making of batteries for everyday electronics such as electric vehicles, computers, and phones. The DRC produces roughly 60% of the worlds supply of cobalt which has made countries and corporations heavily dependent on the Central African nation. As a result there are many cobalt mines scattered across the country, these mines are consisted of child and enslaved labor, long work hours lasting up to 12 hours, pay for as little as a dollar per day, and lastly the mining results in extreme health risks to the miners breathing in toxic fumes. There is also the high risk of mines collapsing and potentially burying people alive. The cobalt mines have also been dentrimental to the local environment causing soil erosion, water pollution, and deforestation.

The ultimate question facing this ethical conflict in the DRC is should the cobalt mines in the DRC be shut down because of the human-rights violations or should the mines be reformed because the rest of the world is so dependent on the convenience and economic growth it gives them?