Why the minerals powering the world’s decarbonisation must also power Africa’s own development — or risk becoming a new chapter in an old story
A Continent at the Centre of a Story It Did Not Write
Africa is once again being told that its underground wealth holds the key to humanity’s future. Cobalt for batteries. Lithium for electric vehicles. Manganese for grid storage. Graphite, nickel, copper and rare earths for the turbines, transmission lines and digital infrastructure of a decarbonising world. Sub-Saharan Africa alone holds roughly 30 percent of the planet’s known critical mineral reserves, and the Democratic Republic of Congo produces around 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply. The International Energy Agency projects that mineral demand from green technologies will multiply several-fold by 2050 — cobalt roughly fourfold, graphite fivefold, lithium more than tenfold, manganese nearly thirtyfold.
This is, by any measure, an extraordinary economic opening. It is also, by the continent’s own bitter historical memory, a familiar one. Africa has stood at the centre of global commodity booms before — in rubber, in gold, in oil, in coltan — and has too often emerged from each with depleted soils, fractured communities, hollowed institutions and a balance sheet tilted permanently toward whoever controlled the processing, the financing and the shipping lanes. The question this moment poses is not whether Africa’s minerals matter to the world. It is whether the world’s need for them will be allowed to reproduce, under a green label, the very extractive logic the continent has spent six decades trying to escape.
This is the essence of what scholars and policy analysts increasingly call green extractivism: the appropriation of a continent’s mineral wealth for a global decarbonisation project whose environmental virtue at the point of consumption does not, by itself, guarantee justice at the point of extraction. A mineral does not become developmental simply because it ends up inside a solar panel rather than a petrol engine. Its legitimacy has to be earned — through how it is mined, processed, taxed, governed, and shared.
The Scale of What Is at Stake
The economic argument for a different path is not sentimental; it is arithmetic. Analysts estimate that processing critical minerals within Africa, rather than exporting them raw, could create over two million jobs and lift continental GDP by roughly 12 percent. Meeting global Paris Agreement targets will require the supply of critical minerals for renewables to roughly quadruple by 2040, demanding an estimated $800 billion in new investment — investment that could anchor African industrial capacity or simply pass through African territory on its way to smelters and factories elsewhere.
The counter-evidence is just as stark. Despite sitting on the world’s richest cobalt reserves, the DRC ranks 180th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index. The continent loses an estimated $20 billion annually to illicit financial flows connected to mining. And in the artisanal cobalt sector — which still supplies a meaningful share of DRC production feeding global battery chains — researchers estimate that tens of thousands of children work in hazardous conditions, while a 2024 U.S. Department of Labor assessment found that a large majority of miners in parts of the sector may be operating under conditions consistent with forced labour: coercion, debt bondage, and other involuntary arrangements. This is the reservoir from which a portion of the world’s “clean” batteries are drawing their raw material.
The pattern is not confined to central Africa. In 2025, a chemical spill from a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned mining enterprise contaminated stretches of Zambia’s Kafue River — a principal national water source — with hazardous heavy metals, exposing how thin the regulatory margin remains even in one of the continent’s more established copper economies. These are not incidental defects in an otherwise sound system. They are recurring features of a mineral economy in which extraction speed has consistently outpaced governance capacity.
Naming the Logic: What “Green Extractivism” Actually Means
The term did not emerge from activist rhetoric alone; it has a serious academic lineage in critical geography and political economy. Scholars analysing the global rush for transition minerals describe a process of “decarbonisation by dispossession” — a dynamic in which the drive to cut emissions in the Global North reproduces, in the Global South, the same enclosures of land, the same weak compensation regimes, and the same externalisation of ecological cost that characterised the fossil and mineral economies of the colonial and postcolonial past. The argument is not that renewable technology is illegitimate. It is that the *mode of extraction* required to build it can carry forward colonial patterns of dispossession even while its end product carries a climate-friendly label.
This is why development economists and African policy voices increasingly insist on separating two distinct questions that global “critical minerals” discourse tends to collapse into one. The first question — asked mainly by mineral-consuming economies — is how to secure reliable, diversified supply chains for their own industrial and defence needs. The second question — the one that matters for Africa’s own trajectory — is how mineral wealth translates into skills, industries, infrastructure and institutions inside the countries where the ore is actually found. A strategy built to answer the first question will not automatically answer the second. Analysts at Power Shift Africa have argued that most global mineral strategies to date have prioritised security of supply for producer-dependent economies in ways that sit in direct tension with Africa’s own industrialisation ambitions — precisely the gap the African Union’s own green minerals strategy was designed to interrupt.
Voices within the “green colonialism” debate go further, arguing that decades of structural adjustment and liberalisation have hollowed out the regulatory capacity of many African states to govern, monitor or enforce standards across their extractive sectors at all — leaving what one researcher bluntly described as states that no longer govern but merely rule over the process. Whether or not one accepts the full force of that claim, the empirical record of the past several years — the Kafue spill, the persistence of forced and child labour in artisanal cobalt, the repeated renegotiation of fiscal terms after contracts are signed — supports its central diagnosis: weak institutional capacity, not merely bad intentions, is what allows extraction to outrun protection.
Ghana’s Test Case: Ewoyaa and the Limits of “First”
Ghana’s own experience with the Ewoyaa lithium project illustrates both the promise and the peril with unusual clarity. In March 2026, Ghana’s Parliament ratified the mining lease for Ewoyaa in the Central Region — the country’s first-ever lithium mining lease, ending years of delay and renegotiation. The final terms replaced a flat 10 percent royalty with a sliding scale tied to market prices, ranging from 5 percent when spodumene concentrate prices fall below $1,500 a tonne to 12 percent above $3,200 — a genuine improvement in fiscal design, won through hard bargaining rather than conceded freely. The resource itself is substantial: an estimated 36.8 million tonnes at 1.24 percent lithium oxide, expected to yield 3.6 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate over a twelve-year mine life, with half of that output already committed under offtake agreements to international battery manufacturers.
Yet even as Parliament celebrated the ratification as a watershed moment, roughly 1,500 farmers in the project’s catchment communities remained without compensation for land and livelihoods lost to restrictions imposed back in 2023, when the lease was first granted and agricultural activity in the concession area was curtailed. Advocates monitoring the project have warned that the very momentum generated by ratification could now fast-track construction ahead of the community-rights and environmental safeguards that a responsible mining regime requires. Ghana’s Natural Resource Governance Institute has separately cautioned that early fiscal-concession requests from the developer needed close scrutiny precisely because Ghana’s leverage is strongest before first production, not after.
This is the crux of the matter: a royalty formula, however improved, is not the same thing as developmental legitimacy. Legitimacy also requires that farmers displaced in 2023 are compensated before spodumene is shipped in 2027 or 2028; that environmental monitoring of the pegmatite belt is independent and public; and that the Central Region sees processing capacity, training pipelines and infrastructure — not merely royalty cheques flowing to Accra.
The Geopolitical Scramble Behind the “Green” Label
Part of what makes this moment distinct from earlier commodity cycles is the sheer density of competing external offers now converging on the same African deposits. The African Union’s own Green Minerals Strategy, adopted by Heads of State in February 2025 and built on four pillars — advancing mineral development, building human and technological capacity, constructing value chains, and practising mineral stewardship — was explicitly designed to shift the framing from “critical” minerals (a supply-security lens serving consumer economies) to “green” minerals (a lens centred on Africa’s own decarbonisation and industrialisation). It draws on the African Mining Vision adopted in 2009, whose ambitions for beneficiation and local content have, by the admission of researchers tracking implementation, seen only limited practical follow-through in the intervening years — a caution against assuming that a well-drafted continental strategy will translate automatically into changed practice on the ground.
Meanwhile, the European Union has signed critical raw materials partnerships with the DRC, Zambia, South Africa, Rwanda and Namibia, and reaffirmed cooperation with the African Union at the Luanda summit in November 2025, backed by pledges under its €300 billion Global Gateway initiative. Yet independent assessments describe the EU’s approach as fragmented and slow-moving relative to competitors, with limited project pipelines that have struggled to convert diplomatic commitments into financed industrial capacity. The United States, together with the EU and regional development banks, has backed the Lobito Corridor — a rail link connecting the Angolan port of Lobito to the copper-cobalt belt of the DRC and Zambia — explicitly framed as a counterweight to Chinese infrastructure dominance in the region. China, for its part, continues to combine mining concessions with turnkey infrastructure financing at a pace and scale that African governments, however wary of the terms, have found difficult to match or refuse; analysts have wryly summarised the contrast as one where Chinese offers are hard to refuse and European offers are hard to understand. Gulf state sovereign wealth funds have entered the same terrain through direct project investment in bauxite, lithium and renewable infrastructure, adding a fourth axis of competition.
None of these external actors is, by itself, Africa’s adversary. But none of them is a substitute for African institutional capacity either. A continent negotiating simultaneously with Brussels, Beijing, Washington and Abu Dhabi — while itself divided into 55 separate jurisdictions with widely varying regulatory strength — risks precisely the disunity that weakens collective bargaining power even as global demand for its minerals accelerates. This is why the African Union’s push for coordinated, continent-wide negotiating positions, harmonised under the African Continental Free Trade Area, is not bureaucratic housekeeping. It is the difference between fifty-five separate weak hands and one strong one.
What Developmental Legitimacy Actually Requires
If green extractivism is the risk, what does its alternative look like in practice? Four elements recur across the policy literature and the lived case studies:
Governance before extraction, not after. Free, prior and informed consent for affected communities, transparent contract terms published before ratification rather than renegotiated under pressure afterward, and independent environmental monitoring with real enforcement teeth — these cannot be retrofitted once a mine is operating. Ghana’s own experience of renegotiating Ewoyaa’s royalty terms after the fact, while ultimately yielding better numbers, illustrates how much stronger the position is when such terms are settled before a lease is granted rather than years into project delay.
Value addition at source. The difference between exporting raw spodumene concentrate and exporting processed lithium hydroxide, or between exporting raw cobalt ore and exporting refined precursor materials for battery manufacturing, is the difference between a resource curse and a resource dividend. The African Green Minerals Strategy’s emphasis on building processing capacity and technical skills locally is the correct diagnosis; the test now is financing and implementation, an area where the AU’s predecessor framework — the African Mining Vision — fell short for over a decade.
Environmental integrity as a non-negotiable floor. The Kafue River contamination is a warning that “green” mineral extraction can produce distinctly non-green environmental harm if regulatory enforcement is weak. Watershed protection, tailings management and biodiversity safeguards must be treated as core project requirements, not afterthoughts to be addressed once civil society or international media raise alarm.
Equitable benefit-sharing with the communities who bear the cost. Compensation for displaced farmers, local employment quotas, community development funds tied to production volumes and independently audited — these are the concrete mechanisms by which mineral wealth becomes local development rather than a distant royalty line in a national treasury. Land dispossession without adequate legal recognition of communal tenure remains one of the most persistent injustices identified in the extractivism literature, and it is one of the more solvable ones, given political will.
A Stewardship Reframing
For those of us who think about development through the lens of creation care as well as economics, there is a further dimension worth naming plainly: the earth being mined is not merely an input to a global supply chain — it is a shared inheritance, and the communities living atop these deposits are not obstacles to project timelines but the first stakeholders whose consent and flourishing any legitimate extraction must serve. A theology and an economics of stewardship converge on the same practical demand: that what is taken from the ground must leave behind more than a hole, a spill and a memory of promises deferred.
Africa does not need to choose between participating in the global energy transition and defending its own developmental sovereignty. But it does need to insist — through the African Union’s coordinated strategy, through national contract renegotiation before rather than after ratification, through independent environmental enforcement, and through processing capacity built at home — that the next chapter of its mineral story is written by Africans, for African development, rather than merely extracted, once again, from African soil.
