Digital infrastructure for Bon Pasteur's child protection work in the cobalt-producing communities of Lualaba Province, southern DRC.
Bon Pasteur, the Good Shepherd Sisters’ programme in Kolwezi, has worked since 2013 to take children out of the mines and back to school, supporting families with alternative livelihoods, education and healthcare.
Together with the Good Shepherd International Foundation and with the support of Mercedes-Benz, Bon Pasteur’s partner on child protection in Kolwezi since 2019, the project is deploying a child labour monitoring and remediation system: one secure platform for the case work, incident response and community engagement behind every child’s journey out of the mines.
Child protection data is only as good as the actor who collects it. The system is anchored on Bon Pasteur, the Good Shepherd Sisters’ programme that has worked in Kolwezi’s artisanal mining communities since 2013 — taking children out of mining work, back into school, and building family livelihoods that no longer depend on the mines.
Their model has been documented by independent researchers and recognised with international awards; few actors on the ground in Kolwezi carry the same credibility. The platform digitises the casework their teams already do.
Learn more about Bon Pasteur →Programme figures published by the Good Shepherd International Foundation (gsif.it), 2013 to date.
Bon Pasteur’s field work generates a constant stream of sensitive, vital information: child case files, school attendance, family follow-ups, incidents at mine sites, commitments made by operators to communities. Until now, that knowledge has lived in paper intake forms, siloed spreadsheets and periodic donor reports. That record is fragile, fragmented, and easy to lose between funding cycles.
Meanwhile, the companies that source cobalt responsibly need credible evidence that remediation works, and European due-diligence rules increasingly require it. The gap between what field teams know and what the supply chain can verify is exactly what this system closes.
The platform is built on the open-source Datastake Application Framework (the same infrastructure that powers Nashiriki) and configured entirely around child protection.
Every capability serves the same purpose: making sure no child, case or commitment is lost from view.
Structured profiles follow each child across remediation cycles: family context, schooling, vocational training and wellbeing, in one secure record.
Field teams plan around the child, not the paperwork.
Institutional memory survives staff turnover and short funding cycles.
Across the DRC, every civil-society organisation protecting children has its own tools and its own approach. IFEDD runs Tazama (tazama.site) for conflict and gender-based violence reporting in North Kivu; many teams collect with KoboToolbox forms; Bon Pasteur works through this system in Kolwezi. That diversity is a strength: each tool is shaped by the people who use it.
It becomes a problem only when the data must travel. The government needs the consolidated picture, and its national child-labour monitoring system (SSRTE) depends on organisations feeding it. But every additional report means compiling the same information again, in another format, for another platform. So sharing stalls, and the national picture stays incomplete.
This system is built for that reality: information is captured once, in the tool the organisation already uses, and reads into the SSRTE, national referral pathways and ILO child-labour indicators, always with the owner's consent. For programmes working to expand responsible mineral supply chains in the DRC, and for the agencies that fund them, the infrastructure is already on the ground, locally governed, and ready to connect.
Each partner engages from where it stands.
The Good Shepherd Sisters’ programme in Kolwezi, running child labour remediation and community development in artisanal mining communities since 2013.
Partner profile →The Good Shepherd International Foundation is the congregation’s development arm, coordinating child protection programmes across some 30 countries and anchoring international partnerships and funding.
Learn moreMercedes-Benz has supported Bon Pasteur's work in Kolwezi since 2019 as part of its responsible battery-material sourcing commitments. It funds the operational work, and gains transparent, structured evidence on child labour risk and remediation progress.
Learn moreDatastake builds open digital infrastructure for the people closest to the problem. The framework that powers Nashiriki, Hatua and KOTA is configured here around child protection, so that a local organisation in Kolwezi runs technology of global standard, and owns it.
Learn moreDoes your organisation work on child protection, responsible sourcing or community development in the DRC? Curious how monitoring and remediation evidence can serve due diligence? Or simply keen to learn more about our approach and partnerships?
