Kinsenda Copper Mine: Chinese Financing for Transition Minerals

Located in the Haut-Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kinsenda is an underground copper mine that produces close to 30,000 metric tons of copper each year. Jinchuan Group, a Chinese state-owned company, acquired the Kinsenda copper mine in 2011, and China Development Bank, one of the two state-owned policy banks, has provided financing over the span of a decade to support development and operations at Kinsenda.

This mining site profile provides a detailed overview of Chinese state-directed financing, ownership, and operations of the Kinsenda mine. It includes granular information on the mine's funding sources (loans, lenders, and co-financing), acquisition history, ownership structure, implementation milestones, ESG challenges, and risk mitigation measures.

The insights in this profile are derived from AidData’s Chinese Financing for Transition Minerals Dataset, Version 1.0 and the sources referenced therein. This dataset captures $56.9 billion of official sector financial commitments that China provided to 19 low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2021 for projects involving the extraction or processing of copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements. An accompanying report, Power Playbook: Beijing’s Bid to Secure Overseas Transition Minerals, analyzes the dataset and provides evidence about the nature, scale, and scope of the PRC’s overseas financing for the extraction and processing of energy transition minerals.