Africa’s critical minerals are central to the global economy. Cobalt supports electric vehicle batteries and energy storage. Copper underpins electricity networks and digital infrastructure. Platinum group metals are important to industrial and clean-energy technologies. Lithium is increasingly important to battery production, while bauxite is essential to aluminium manufacturing.
The geography of these resources is well known. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produces approximately 70% of the world’s cobalt. Guinea is one of the world’s leading sources of bauxite. Zambia and the DRC are major copper producers. South Africa dominates global platinum group metals, and Zimbabwe has become an increasingly important lithium producer.
Less discussed is the geography of policy expertise.
Minerals may be extracted in Africa, but many of the decisions that shape their value are made elsewhere: in corporate boardrooms, international financial institutions, trade negotiations, climate-finance discussions and supply-chain partnerships. If African resources have global consequences, the professionals governing them must have the analytical reach to operate at domestic, regional, continental and international levels.
They must also be equipped with an African-centred framework.
The global importance of African resources
The International Monetary Fund estimates that sub-Saharan Africa holds around 30% of the world’s proven critical-mineral reserves. The DRC alone dominates the global cobalt market, while the region possesses significant reserves and production capacity in copper, manganese, graphite, platinum group metals, bauxite and lithium.
This concentration gives Africa potential influence over the energy transition and the technologies of the future. Yet mineral wealth does not automatically create bargaining power. That depends on how resources are governed, how contracts are negotiated, where processing takes place and whether revenues are converted into productive capabilities.
At present, there is a significant gap between extraction and value capture.
Many African economies continue to export minerals in raw or minimally processed forms, while refining, component manufacturing and final production take place outside the continent. The IMF notes that the DRC exports the overwhelming majority of its cobalt in unprocessed form, with much of it entering supply chains connected to China. Zimbabwean lithium has also largely left the continent as concentrate rather than becoming the foundation for a regional battery industry.
This is not simply a problem of infrastructure, capital or technology. It is also a problem of policy capacity.
Governments require specialists who can understand geological data, mining law, public finance, industrial policy, environmental regulation, trade rules and international diplomacy as parts of one connected system. They need negotiators who can ask not only how much a mineral is worth today, but what capabilities its extraction can build over the next twenty years.
From commodity extraction to African-directed industrialisation
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains essential to understanding this challenge. Rodney showed that African underdevelopment was not a natural condition or an accidental failure to modernise. It was produced through historical relationships of extraction, unequal exchange and economic structures designed to serve external interests.
The contemporary critical-minerals economy risks reproducing this pattern in a new form. The minerals may now be required for electric vehicles, renewable energy and digital technologies rather than colonial-era industries, but the structure can remain familiar: extraction in Africa, value addition elsewhere and limited control over the terms of trade.
Kwame Nkrumah offered a complementary political strategy. In Africa Must Unite, he argued that continental unity was necessary for African states to exercise meaningful influence in world affairs. For Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism was not only a cultural identity or moral aspiration. It was an institutional and economic strategy.
A fragmented group of states negotiating separately with powerful corporations and external governments will usually possess less leverage than a coordinated continent with shared standards, integrated markets and common priorities.
This is why the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) matters. The World Bank describes AfCFTA as connecting 1.3 billion people across 55 countries, with a combined GDP of approximately US$3.4 trillion. The agreement creates the possibility of a continental market large enough to support regional production, manufacturing and investment.
Its promise is not limited to reducing tariffs. AfCFTA could help African countries develop minerals-based value chains in which different countries contribute extraction, processing, research, component manufacturing, assembly and services. Copper and cobalt from the DRC and Zambia, for example, could support regional production of battery materials and electric mobility technologies. South Africa’s industrial base and platinum group metals could contribute to advanced manufacturing, while other regions provide complementary minerals, energy and technical expertise.
Achieving this requires more than signing agreements. It requires professionals who understand how to translate continental frameworks into implementable policy.
The decisions are made across multiple global arenas
African resource policy is increasingly shaped by international rules and initiatives.
The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act seeks to reduce supply-chain dependence through strategic partnerships with mineral-producing countries. The EU has established raw-materials partnerships with countries including the DRC, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Zambia. These arrangements include discussions around investment, infrastructure, processing, research, skills and sustainable sourcing.
The United States’ Inflation Reduction Act uses tax credits and sourcing requirements to influence the geography of battery and critical-mineral supply chains. Under Section 30D, part of the clean-vehicle tax credit depends on where critical minerals are extracted, processed or recycled, while another part depends on where battery components are manufactured or assembled.
These measures have direct implications for African producers. They affect which minerals qualify for particular markets, which investments become commercially attractive and how companies structure their supply chains.
The same is true of the G20, the World Trade Organization, climate-finance institutions and international negotiations on energy and industrial standards. Decisions made in these spaces can influence access to finance, technology transfer, market entry and development opportunities.
African governments therefore need policy experts who can work across scales. A national mining ministry cannot operate in isolation from regional trade arrangements. A finance ministry cannot design a resource-revenue strategy without understanding global commodity cycles. A trade negotiator must understand the relationship between AfCFTA rules, external market access and industrial development.
The expert must be both technically capable and politically grounded.
An African-centred approach to policy expertise
An African-centred approach does not reject international knowledge. It asks more important questions about how knowledge is produced, whose interests it serves and how it is applied.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work on epistemic freedom is valuable here. In Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization, he argues for the freedom to think, theorise and produce knowledge from Africa’s own historical and geopolitical location.
This matters because policy frameworks developed elsewhere are often applied to African contexts as if they were universally neutral. A standard extractive model may prioritise short-term export revenues. An African-centred model asks how resource governance can support employment, technological capability, public services, ecological protection and regional integration.
Samir Amin’s work on delinking and unequal development also offers a useful insight. Delinking does not mean isolation. It means organising external economic relations around domestic and regional development priorities rather than allowing external demand to determine the shape of the economy.
For African policymakers, this could mean negotiating investment agreements that include meaningful technology transfer, local procurement, skills development, transparent revenue-sharing and regional processing. It could mean resisting competition between African states that drives down standards and weakens bargaining power. It could mean designing mineral strategies around long-term industrialisation rather than short-term export volumes.
This is the difference between having resources and exercising resource sovereignty.
Building the next generation of policy leaders
Africa needs economists, lawyers, diplomats, researchers, civil servants, entrepreneurs and development professionals who can operate confidently in global policy spaces without losing sight of African priorities.
They must be able to analyse a mining contract and a trade agreement. They must understand the political economy of extraction and the technical requirements of processing. They must be able to engage with the language of climate finance while asking who benefits from the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Most importantly, they must see Pan-Africanism as a practical framework for coordination, industrialisation and collective advancement.
This is the kind of professional development supported by the School of Pan African Studies’ course on the Politics of Development in Africa, its work on Political Analysis and Research: Decolonial Methods, and its Introduction to Pan-Africanism.
The experts Africa needs
The central question is no longer whether Africa possesses resources that the world needs. It does.
The question is whether Africa has the policy expertise to determine how those resources are governed, processed, valued and used.
That expertise must be globally connected but African-centred. It must combine rigorous research with historical understanding, technical competence with political judgement, and professional ambition with a commitment to collective development.
Nkrumah understood that unity strengthens Africa’s voice. Rodney demonstrated how external control of production creates underdevelopment. Amin showed why development must be organised on terms that serve the Global South. Ndlovu-Gatsheni reminds us that intellectual sovereignty is inseparable from political and economic transformation.
Together, these ideas point towards a clear task: building a policy class capable of shaping the future rather than merely responding to decisions made elsewhere.
If you want to deepen your knowledge, boost your policy skills and prepare to contribute to Africa’s development, explore the School of Pan African Studies’ programmes and courses. Join a growing community of learners, researchers and professionals working towards more capable institutions, stronger regional cooperation and African-directed development.
Sources and further reading
- International Monetary Fund, “Digging for Opportunity: Harnessing Sub-Saharan Africa’s Wealth in Critical Minerals”
- United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, “Africa’s critical mineral resources, a boon for intra-African trade and regional integration”
- World Bank, The African Continental Free Trade Area
- European Commission, Raw Materials Diplomacy
- Nkrumah, Kwame. Africa Must Unite (1963).
- Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).
- Amin, Samir. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (1990).
- Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018). Open-access edition
