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Bas Van Abel, a man who has created what he is calling ” the world’s first ethical smartphone”

Bas didn’t start as a company,  he started as a campaign instead which was about how can he give visibility to the situation in eastern Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) , a home to minerals and metals essential to the manufacture of mobile  phones, but was suffering from conflicts and the spoil of mineral resources.

After the crowdfunding campaign went successfully, their Fairphone was launched in 2013 . Bas and his colleagues wanted to prove to customers and to multinational corporations, that it is possible to create phones that are ethical and sustainable.

Bas and his colleagues have faced difficulties in phasing out conflict minerals used in phones. One of the big problems dealing with the DRC is the small-scale informal mining common in the country. People are just digging this stuff out of the ground and selling it to intermediary buying organizations. There are some 1.8 million people carrying out small scale mining in the DRC. The informality and lack of structure in the minerals mining business in DRC adds to the difficulty of tracing the origins of the elements going into mobiles. Even Fairphone admits it has only managed to completely phase out two of the four conflict minerals used in phones.

Today, Bas’s company has now sold more than 82,000 phones. With such an unexpected success, he still insist on his original intention of starting the company, which is to source the phones’ materials from non-conflict mines and support local economies.

Bas is not deterred by the company’s tiny market share. He said that, “We’re not in it to become the biggest phone company in the world. But by doing what we do, we show that there’s a market, we grow the demand.”

References:

1. Can an ethical smartphone change the world? By Anna Hooligan. BBC News, The Hague http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35094050

2)  Picture: http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/4D1C/production/_87204791_fairphone2,ethicalsourcing.jpg

3) “People are just digging this stuff … … scale mining in the DRC. “said by Bady Balde from the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative pressure group.