"Africa’s (Modern) Slavery Problem"

... Africa alone hosts inordinate amounts of mineral, gold, cobalt, palladium and platinum deposits enticing foreign interests and heavy Chinese investment. Often, however, such vast resource wealth in the hands of foreign corporate entities combined with poor regulation and state corruption raises grave concerns over equitable revenue sharing, land ownership rights, and respect for fundamental human rights. The world’s rapacious appetite for natural resources, metallic, and mineral goods necessary to fuel the digital lives of western societies and quench the ever-deepening thirst of Chinese industrialists has once again turned the continent into a modern epicenter of slavery...

The resurgence of widespread and pervasive forms of modern slavery on the African continent coincides with the reinvigoration of the mining industry, which in turn, benefits from an amalgamation of human vulnerabilities. Poverty and civil conflict, fragile peace, debilitated post-conflict economy, low income, poor health and education of the general population increase opportunities for debt-bondage and resource depletion through unauthorized, poorly monitored and rudimentary illicit digging...

The world’s ferocious demand for Africa’s resources, over decades of Western domination and exploitation, only exacerbated the continent’s underdevelopment and increased its dependence. The scramble for Africa’s wealth encompassed material and human goods leaving the continent’s men, women and children at the mercy of the supply and demand chains of the global economy.