The New Contest for Africa’s Critical Minerals
The battle is no longer over who owns the minerals. It is over who controls the value chain.
On 2 June 2026, in Lusaka, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa launched a roughly €15 million, five-year programme to strengthen critical-minerals value chains across six Southern African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa.
Funded by Germany and running through 2031, the initiative is framed in the language of value addition, industrialisation, job creation and the energy transition.
That description is accurate. It is also incomplete.
For executives responsible for supply chains, manufacturing footprints, energy strategy or geopolitical risk, the relevant fact is not the money. It is the institution spending it, and the direction the spend reveals.
What the ECA is, and why its involvement matters
The Economic Commission for Africa is worth understanding before the project is.
It is one of five regional commissions of the United Nations, established in 1958, headquartered in Addis Ababa and accountable to the continent’s member states. Its mandate is economic development, not security or diplomacy. Institutionally, it is a body that builds frameworks rather than chases headlines.
When an institution of that kind commits to mineral processing rather than mineral extraction, it is not making a bet on commodity prices. It is taking a position on where African governments intend to sit in a supply chain that the rest of the world has now decided is strategic.
The ECA is the same institution that helped establish the DRC-Zambia transboundary battery and electric-vehicle special economic zone alongside Afreximbank in 2025. This programme is continuous with that effort, not separate from it. The pattern matters more than the project itself. Africa’s development machinery is being directed, deliberately, towards the midstream.
The minerals, and the assumption that is dying
The region holds many of the inputs required for the energy transition.
Zimbabwe has become a major lithium producer. South Africa dominates manganese and the platinum-group metals. Zambia remains one of the world’s largest copper producers. The Democratic Republic of Congo controls the majority of global cobalt production. Namibia is positioning itself around uranium, rare earths and green-hydrogen-linked supply chains.
For two decades, multinational firms operated on a simple assumption: these supply chains would become more globalised, more efficient and more integrated. Extract where costs were lowest. Process where costs were lowest. Ship where demand existed.
That assumption is breaking down.
Governments no longer treat critical minerals as ordinary commodities. They treat them as strategic assets, and increasingly behave accordingly. Export controls, local-processing requirements, investment screening mechanisms and industrial policy are all designed to capture more value domestically.
At least thirteen African countries have introduced mineral-export restrictions since 2023. Malawi banned raw mineral exports outright in 2025. Historically, much of this material left the continent in raw or semi-processed form. Across the region, political leaders have concluded that this model delivers too little value to producing countries.
The ECA programme is the multilateral expression of that conclusion.
Why this is now a great-power question
The development framing leaves out a crucial piece of context.
The reason value addition in Southern Africa is suddenly attracting coordinated international attention is that the midstream, processing and refining, has become one of the most concentrated chokepoints in the global economy.
Much of that concentration sits in China.
China refines roughly 70 per cent of the world’s strategically important minerals and produces close to 90 per cent of high-performance rare-earth magnets. That concentration is not merely an industrial fact. It is geopolitical leverage.
In 2025, Beijing demonstrated exactly how much leverage it possesses.
In April, China imposed export controls on seven heavy rare-earth elements. Western and allied manufacturers found themselves scrambling within weeks. In October, Beijing went further, asserting licensing authority over foreign-made products containing as little as 0.1 per cent Chinese-origin rare earths. The approach closely mirrored the extraterritorial logic Washington has long used in export controls.
The measures were subsequently suspended following understandings reached at the APEC summit in Busan.
The leverage was demonstrated, then holstered. It did not disappear.
At the same time, China has expanded upstream across Africa. Chinese firms have acquired or secured mining interests across the continent, including lithium, copper and rare-earth assets. One Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer alone secured interests in six African lithium mines to support future battery production.
Washington has responded differently, relying more heavily on alliances, investment partnerships and coordinated supply-chain frameworks with countries such as Australia and Japan.
The competition has become structural.
Southern Africa, holding substantial reserves while simultaneously attempting to build processing capacity, increasingly finds itself at the centre of that competition.
This is what the ECA programme quietly changes.
Every tonne of cobalt, lithium or manganese processed in Lusaka, Lubumbashi or Harare rather than exported in raw form shifts a small portion of the value chain away from existing chokepoints.
That is a development outcome.
It is also a geopolitical one.
The two are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.
The European angle: the multilateralists are playing a different game
It is worth noting who is financing this programme.
Germany is providing the funding through its International Climate Initiative.
That is not incidental.
It may be the clearest indication of how Europe intends to compete in the critical-minerals race, and its approach differs markedly from both Washington and Beijing.
China seeks influence through ownership and control of assets.
The United States seeks influence through alliances, subsidies and preferred supply arrangements.
Europe is increasingly attempting to shape the ecosystem itself.
It is funding multilateral development channels, embedding environmental and social standards into supply chains and positioning itself as the partner that helps producing countries industrialise rather than simply extract.
The same logic is visible in the EU-South Africa Clean Trade and Investment Partnership launched in 2025, which explicitly seeks to support domestic processing capacity rather than continued reliance on raw-material exports.
Brussels and Berlin appear to be betting that producing countries will favour partners willing to support industrialisation and local value creation.
Whether that strategy succeeds remains uncertain.
That it is now being pursued with public money is not.
For firms sourcing from the region, the European approach brings both obligations and advantages. It implies greater environmental, social and governance requirements throughout the supply chain. It may also produce relationships that are more durable because they are built around industrial partnerships rather than purely extractive arrangements.
What this means at the board level
For companies seeking to diversify critical-minerals supply chains, Southern Africa presents genuine opportunity.
The past five years have demonstrated the fragility of concentrated supply networks. Pandemic disruptions, Red Sea shipping attacks, Taiwan Strait tensions and rare-earth restrictions have all reinforced the same lesson.
Concentrated supply is fragile supply.
Southern Africa offers part of the solution.
But diversification does not eliminate geopolitical risk.
It changes its character.
Companies entering these ecosystems inherit evolving regulatory regimes, infrastructure constraints, local-content requirements and political pressure to maximise domestic benefit.
A lithium project that appears attractive today may face export restrictions tomorrow.
A processing facility may only remain viable if regional trade arrangements hold together.
A supplier relationship may depend as much on geopolitical alignment as on price.
What appears to be a procurement decision increasingly becomes a question of political economy.
That makes it a board-level issue rather than simply a sourcing issue.
The old model optimised for efficiency.
The emerging model optimises for resilience.
The ECA programme, Chinese acquisitions, American supply-chain frameworks and European industrial partnerships all point in the same direction.
The transition is already underway.
Enterprise Geopolitics takeaway: The most important supply-chain question is no longer simply Where do we source? It is How exposed are we to the political and economic objectives of the jurisdictions that control strategic resources, and to the great-power competition increasingly being fought through them?
In Southern Africa, China, the United States and Europe are each attempting to shape the answer. The ECA’s new programme suggests African governments increasingly intend to shape it as well.
The firms that map that competition early will navigate it.
The firms that read this as a mining story will be surprised by it.
Patrick Fruchet
Fruchet Consulting • Enterprise Geopolitics
patrick@fruchet.com | www.fruchet.com