The New Scramble for Africa’s Critical Minerals: Cobalt, Lithium, and Who Really Controls the Green Energy Transition

The world’s green energy transition has a geography. It runs through the Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds more than 70 percent of global cobalt reserves and more than half of known reserves of coltan. Through Zimbabwe, Namibia, and the DRC again, which together hold significant shares of the world’s lithium. Through South Africa’s Bushveld Complex, which produces approximately 75 percent of global platinum group metals — essential for hydrogen fuel cells and catalytic converters.^[1]

The electric vehicles that Europe, North America, and China are producing at scale to meet their net-zero commitments run on batteries whose chemistry depends on cobalt, lithium, manganese, and nickel. The solar panels and wind turbines at the centre of the energy transition require copper, silicon, and rare earth elements. And the infrastructure of a decarbonised global economy — from transmission lines to grid storage systems — demands mineral inputs that the African continent holds in extraordinary concentration.

The question is not whether Africa’s minerals matter to the green energy transition. They are indispensable to it. The question is who controls the terms on which they are extracted, processed, and traded — and whether African governments and populations will capture a meaningful share of the economic value they generate, or whether the new scramble for Africa’s resources will repeat the structural dynamics of the old one.

The Scale of Africa’s Critical Mineral Endowment

Africa’s mineral wealth is not a future potential. It is a present, documented, and actively exploited reality. The DRC alone holds an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral deposits — a figure so large it is almost meaningless without context, but whose components are instructive: the cobalt reserves that underpin every lithium-ion battery in every electric vehicle produced globally; the coltan that is refined into tantalum for capacitors in smartphones, laptops, and defence electronics; the lithium now being actively explored in its southern provinces.^[2]

Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the world’s most significant lithium producers, with the Bikita and Arcadia deposits among the largest hard-rock lithium reserves on the continent. Namibia’s Green Hydrogen project — backed by the German government and private investors — is designed to use the country’s solar and wind resources to produce green hydrogen for export to Europe, exploiting Namibia’s renewable energy advantage as a complement to its mineral endowment.^[3] Zambia and the DRC, together, form the “Copperbelt” — one of the world’s largest copper deposits, whose output is critical for electrification infrastructure globally.

The International Energy Agency projects that demand for critical minerals will increase by four to six times by 2040 as the energy transition accelerates.^[4] For Africa, whose share of global critical mineral reserves is disproportionately large relative to its share of global manufacturing capacity, this creates both an enormous opportunity and an acute vulnerability: the opportunity to leverage resource wealth into industrialisation and development; the vulnerability of remaining a raw material exporter in a value chain whose profits accumulate elsewhere.

 

>70%	of global cobalt reserves held in the DRC alone USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 — plus 50%+ of known global coltan

 

4–6×	Projected increase in global critical mineral demand by 2040 IEA Critical Minerals Market Review 2024 — driven by EV batteries, solar, wind infrastructure

 

$24tn

Estimated value of DRC’s untapped mineral deposits World Bank / DRC Ministry of Mines, 2024 — cobalt, coltan, lithium, copper, gold

 

Three Fault Lines in Africa’s Mineral Geopolitics

1.  The processing gap: exporting rock, importing value.

Africa’s most fundamental problem in the critical minerals space is not a shortage of resources. It is a near-total absence of processing capacity. The DRC exports approximately 80 percent of its cobalt as raw or semi-processed ore. That ore is shipped — predominantly to China, which controls roughly 70 percent of global cobalt refining capacity — where it is processed into battery-grade chemicals, incorporated into battery cells, and ultimately sold back to the world at a price that reflects the full value chain.^[5]

The economics of this arrangement are clear and consistently unfavourable to African producers. A tonne of cobalt ore exported from the DRC earns a fraction of the value of a tonne of refined cobalt, which earns a fraction of the value of cobalt incorporated into battery cells, which earns a fraction of the value of a battery pack in an electric vehicle sold in Munich or Shanghai. The IEA estimates that for every dollar of value generated in the critical minerals supply chain, less than ten cents accrues to the mining country when it exports raw ore rather than processed material.^[4]

Several African governments have recognised this and attempted to respond. Zimbabwe banned the export of unprocessed lithium ore in December 2022, requiring in-country beneficiation before export — a bold move that drew immediate criticism from international investors but that reflected a legitimate sovereign decision to capture more value from the country’s resources.^[3] The DRC’s 2018 Mining Code introduced higher royalty rates and local content requirements. Zambia has been exploring copper smelting capacity expansion with support from the AfDB. But building processing infrastructure at scale requires capital, technology, and energy that most African governments do not currently have access to on favourable terms.

2.  China’s structural dominance: first-mover advantage in a critical decade.

China’s position in Africa’s critical minerals sector is not the result of diplomatic cunning alone. It is the product of a deliberate, decade-long industrial policy that identified critical minerals as a strategic priority and acted on that identification with state-directed investment when Western capitals were not paying attention. Chinese companies — predominantly state-linked — now control significant shares of cobalt and copper mining operations in the DRC and Zambia, hold major stakes in lithium projects in Zimbabwe and Mali, and dominate the refining capacity that turns African raw materials into battery inputs.^[5]

The US and EU have recognised this structural disadvantage and are attempting to respond. The US’s Minerals Security Partnership, launched in 2022, aims to develop alternative critical mineral supply chains through partnerships with allied and partner countries, including several African states.^[6] The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act of 2024 sets benchmarks for diversifying supply chains and identifies strategic partnerships with Africa as central to achieving them. Memoranda of Understanding on critical minerals have been signed between the EU and the DRC, Namibia, Zambia, and Rwanda.^[7]

But the fundamental asymmetry remains: China has processing infrastructure, established relationships, and operational presence that took a decade to build. Western partnerships, however well-intentioned, are starting from a position of significant structural disadvantage and operating on a timeline that may not match the pace of the energy transition’s demands.

3.  The governance gap: artisanal mining and the human cost of the clean energy supply chain.

The green energy transition has a human cost that is concentrated in Africa and almost entirely invisible in the marketing of electric vehicles and solar panels in European and North American consumer markets. An estimated 40,000 children work in artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC — in conditions that have been documented by Amnesty International, the UN, and investigative journalists as involving exposure to toxic dust, physical danger, and wages that amount to fractions of a dollar per day.^[8]

Artisanal and small-scale mining accounts for approximately 15 to 30 percent of DRC cobalt output and represents the livelihood of communities with no viable alternative employment. Eliminating it without addressing its root causes — poverty, absence of formal sector employment, inadequate infrastructure — would simply displace the same populations into equally precarious conditions. The “responsible sourcing” frameworks developed by the Responsible Minerals Initiative and OECD Due Diligence Guidance are genuine improvements on what preceded them, but they operate primarily as risk management tools for corporate supply chains rather than as development frameworks for mining communities.^[8]

 

“Africa’s minerals are indispensable to the world’s green future. The question is whether that future will be built on African terms or extracted from African soil for value that accumulates elsewhere — as it has, in every previous resource cycle, for five hundred years.” Africa & Global Power  —  Day 21 Editorial Position

 

What African Governments Are Doing — and What They Need

The most significant policy development in Africa’s critical minerals landscape in recent years has been the emergence of a more assertive resource nationalism — not the crude, investment-destroying nationalisation of the 1970s, but a more sophisticated insistence on beneficiation requirements, higher royalties, local content rules, and regional processing ambitions. Zimbabwe’s lithium export ban, the DRC’s revised Mining Code, and Zambia’s ambitions for copper value addition are the most visible examples.^[9]

The African Minerals Development Centre — a joint AU–UNECA body — has developed the Africa Mining Vision, a continental framework adopted in 2009 but gaining renewed political traction, which sets out the principle that African mineral wealth should be a foundation for industrialisation rather than simply a source of export revenue.^[9] The practical implementation of this vision requires something the framework itself cannot provide: the capital to build refineries and processing plants, the energy to power them, and the technical capacity to operate them at global standards.

Here, the intersection with Day 18’s debt analysis is direct. African governments whose fiscal space is constrained by debt service obligations cannot easily allocate the public capital required to build processing infrastructure. The financing gap for critical minerals beneficiation in Africa has been estimated at more than $250 billion over the next decade.^[10] Filling it requires concessional financing, technology transfer, and trade arrangements that grant African processed minerals preferential access to European and North American markets — not as charity, but as the terms of a minerals partnership that shares value more equitably than the current raw-material export model does.

 

 

 

Verdict: The Green Transition Cannot Be Ethical If Its Supply Chain Is Extractive.

The global green energy transition is, in its current form, replicating the structural dynamics of every previous resource boom in Africa: extraction concentrated on the continent, value addition and profit concentrated elsewhere, and the communities bearing the environmental and social costs of mining receiving the smallest share of the returns. The language has changed — “responsible sourcing,” “just transition,” “critical mineral partnerships” — but the underlying economics have not changed enough.

What a genuinely equitable critical minerals framework would look like is not mysterious. It would require: processing infrastructure financed on concessional terms as a condition of market access agreements; trade arrangements that grant African refined and processed minerals preferential tariffs in EU and US markets; binding due diligence requirements that extend responsibility for artisanal mining conditions up the supply chain to end manufacturers; and a genuine transfer of battery technology and manufacturing capacity to African partners rather than a perpetual arrangement in which Africa supplies the chemistry and imports the product.

None of this will happen through voluntary corporate commitments or aspirational partnership frameworks alone. It requires the same political will that built the green energy transition’s demand side — legislation, investment mandates, trade policy, and diplomatic priority — applied to its supply side. Africa is not asking to be rescued from the green transition. It is asking to be part of it on terms that reflect the value of what it contributes.

 

 

REFERENCES

 

[1]  USGS (2025). Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 [DRC cobalt >70% global reserves; South Africa PGMs 75%; DRC/Zimbabwe/Namibia lithium; global critical mineral distribution]. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/mcs2025

[2]  World Bank / DRC Ministry of Mines (2024). DRC Mining Sector Assessment [$24tn untapped deposits; cobalt, coltan, lithium, copper, gold breakdown; artisanal mining share 15–30%]. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/drc/publication/mining-sector-2024

[3]  Zimbabwe Ministry of Mines (2022–2024). Lithium Export Ban and Beneficiation Policy [Bikita and Arcadia deposits; December 2022 raw ore export ban; investor response; processing requirements]. https://www.mines.gov.zw/lithium-beneficiation-policy

[4]  International Energy Agency (2024). Critical Minerals Market Review 2024 [4–6× demand increase by 2040; EV battery chemistry requirements; <10c/$1 value accrual to raw-ore exporters; supply chain analysis]. https://www.iea.org/reports/critical-minerals-market-review-2024

[5]  BloombergNEF / Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (2024). China’s Dominance in Cobalt Refining [~70% global refining capacity; DRC-to-China ore flow; 80% raw export rate; battery supply chain structure]. https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/reports/china-cobalt-refining-2024

[6]  US Department of State (2024). Minerals Security Partnership: Progress Report [2022 launch; partner country list; DRC, Zambia, Namibia engagements; alternative supply chain targets]. https://www.state.gov/minerals-security-partnership-2024

[7]  European Commission (2024). Critical Raw Materials Act: Implementation and Africa Partnerships [2024 Act benchmarks; DRC, Namibia, Zambia, Rwanda MoUs; supply chain diversification targets]. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/critical-raw-materials-act-2024

[8]  Amnesty International / OECD (2023). Responsible Mineral Sourcing in the DRC [40,000 children in ASM; toxic dust exposure; RMI and OECD Due Diligence frameworks; supply chain traceability limits]. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/7064/2023/en

[9]  African Union / UNECA (2023). Africa Mining Vision: 2023 Stocktake [2009 AMV framework; DRC 2018 Mining Code; Zambia copper beneficiation; Zimbabwe precedent; AU political traction renewed]. https://www.africaminingvision.org/stocktake-2023

[10]  African Development Bank (2024). Financing Critical Minerals Beneficiation in Africa [$250bn+ financing gap; concessional finance requirements; technology transfer; EU/US preferential tariff proposals]. https://www.afdb.org/en/documents/financing-critical-minerals-beneficiation-2024