As delegations meet in Washington to discuss critical minerals, many in eastern DRC fear their country will gain little in the process. Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo – In cities in the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to some of the world’s largest cobalt and copper reserves, eyes are on the outcome of a meeting happening thousands of kilometers away.

In Washington, DC, on Wednesday, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, where delegations from 50 countries including the DRC will discuss efforts to strengthen and diversify mineral supply chains as the US seeks to counter China’s global dominance in the sector.

As part of a “resources-for-security” type deal agreed last year, the US signed a mining agreement with Kinshasa’s government to secure supplies of components essential to its technological innovation, economic power, and national security.

While Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi has touted the economic benefits of the endeavor, many in the country’s mining epicenter – trapped between poverty and armed violence – see only further oppression on the horizon.

“We are exploited in mineral extraction,” said Gerard Buunda, an economics student in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, which is a significant source of the world’s coltan, tin and gold resouces. “There are investors who make us work; sometimes they chase us off our land and force us to work for them in their mines for their own selfish interests.

“We don’t want to be exploited any more.”

Buunda, 28, who was born not far from the mineral-rich city of Rubaya, condemns what he says are foreign multinationals exposing people to poverty and low wages, child exploitation, and environmental degradation – putting Congolese lives at risk.

He fears that the Donald Trump administration’s voracity for critical minerals could heighten socio-political instability in many parts of the world.

“Here in eastern DRC, the people who finance mineral exploitation, when they find new mines, buy land from local communities in collusion with our leaders and displace them, and this is the root cause of insecurity,” said Buunda.

He called on African leaders, especially those in the DRC, to avoid being “the fall guys” and instead keep an eye on the future of their own rare earths.

A miner holds newly extracted coltan ore in Rubaya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo

‘They said: please come and take our minerals’

With large deposits of cobalt and lithium – which are essential for electric vehicle batteries and renewable technologies – the Congolese authorities are promoting the DRC as a solution for the energy transition.

The US has shown interest, including directly linking security guarantees to resource extraction when it mediated the signing of a peace deal between conflict-prone neighbours DRC and Rwanda last year.

“I actually stopped the war with Congo and Rwanda,” Trump claimed in December. “And they said to me, ‘Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.’ Which we’ll do.”

Koko Buroko Gloire, a Congolese international affairs commentator based in Kenya, doubts the DRC will gain anything solid from the deal with the US. The market for critical minerals, he believes, is attracting the “covetousness” of major world powers who are lining up for an “increasingly geopolitical” battle.

But at the end of the day, for the DRC, Koko says the benefits – or lack of them – will depend on the will of the Congolese leadership.

“If this deal will allow us, the Congolese people, to have roads from point A to point B, to have clean water, to have hospitals, to have water, I think it’s a good deal,” he told Al Jazeera, urging Congolese leaders to make sure the DRC does not come out empty-handed.

Before Trump came to office, former US President Joe Biden visited the region, in part to discuss the Lobito Corridor railway infrastructure project, which is currently in disrepair in DRC but will connect the country’s mining provinces to Angola, along the Atlantic Coast – a key port for the export of minerals from Africa to the US.

According to satellite image analysis carried out by Global Witness, up to 6,500 people could be affected by displacement linked to the development of the Lobito corridor in the DRC.

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