The global scramble for critical minerals is reshaping economies, trade relationships, and geopolitical alliances. At the centre of it is Africa, a continent that holds a vast share of the world's reserves of cobalt, copper, and gold, yet has historically captured only a fraction of their value.
That calculation is starting to change, driven by surging demand from electric vehicle manufacturers, grid operators, AI data centre builders, and defence industries. What was once a mining story is becoming a strategic one.
The minerals the world cannot do without
Cobalt sits at the top of the critical minerals agenda for one reason: the DRC produces nearly 75% of global supply. For any country serious about electric vehicles or grid-scale energy storage, that concentration of supply in a single nation is both an opportunity and a vulnerability.
Copper tells a similar story. Prices have rallied to all-time highs, driven by demand from grid expansions, electrification programmes, and the construction of AI data centres, which are among the most electricity-intensive buildings ever built. Anywhere electricity flows, copper is involved. The copperbelt stretching across the DRC and Zambia is among the richest copper regions on Earth, and Zambia has set a target of 3 million tonnes of annual production by 2031, more than triple its current output.
Gold, meanwhile, remains Africa's most enduring minerals story. Ghana, South Africa, and Burkina Faso continue to supply global markets, supporting millions of jobs across formal and artisanal mining and providing critical foreign exchange for governments across the continent.
What Africa wants from its own resources
The framing of critical minerals looks different depending on where you are sitting. Western governments and the EU have defined criticality largely around supply chain security and the clean energy transition. African governments have their own list of priorities: industrialisation, job creation, and economic development.
Kwasi Ampofo of Bloomberg NEF puts it plainly: the continent is not interested in simply exporting raw materials at the bottom of the value chain. The push is toward value addition, processing minerals domestically rather than shipping them out to be refined and manufactured elsewhere. Some countries, including Ghana, the DRC, and Zambia, are making meaningful progress on project expansion. But the growth is uneven, and coordinated policy, infrastructure investment, and access to capital remain the missing pieces in too many places.
Foreign investment, from the US, China, and others, still has a role. The condition being set more explicitly now is that partnerships must be win-win arrangements rather than extraction deals that leave little behind.
KoBold, AI, and the unexplored copperbelt
US-backed KoBold Metals is running one of the largest mineral exploration campaigns in the DRC, covering approximately 3,000 square kilometres. The company is using artificial intelligence to digitise decades of historical mining data, improving transparency and identifying deposits that conventional exploration methods might miss.
The DRC government is actively encouraging this kind of investment. The Minister of Mines has been public about the need for more exploration capital, and the government is working to improve governance and security conditions to attract it. The argument is straightforward: exploration today leads to the producing mines of the next decade, and the DRC still has enormous unexplored potential.
Ivanhoe Mines founder Robert Friedland makes the same point about the African continent more broadly. Most of the world's easily accessible copper deposits have been found. Grade quality at existing mines is declining. The next generation of copper supply, the world needs significantly more, is likely to come from Africa.
The railway wars
Getting minerals out of central Africa is as much a logistical challenge as a geological one. The region's infrastructure is poorly developed, and the cost and difficulty of moving copper and cobalt from mine to export market eats into the economics of every project.
Two major railway corridors are now under development, and they have become a proxy for the broader geopolitical contest over African minerals. The US and EU are backing a western rail corridor running from southern Congo to an Angolan port. China has invested nearly $1.4 billion in refurbishing the Tazara railway, an existing line connecting the Zambian copperbelt to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Some describe the two corridors as complementary. Others see them as a direct power play between the West and China for preferential access to critical minerals. Zambia, which sits at the intersection of both projects, is trying to navigate carefully. President Hichilema has emphasised that both railways benefit not just mining companies but farmers, by providing faster and cheaper routes to global markets for agricultural exports. The infrastructure question, in other words, is bigger than minerals.
Botswana looks beyond diamonds
Botswana built one of Africa's most stable economies on diamonds, largely through the Debswana partnership with De Beers, a public-private model that channelled significant revenue to the government. As global diamond demand softens, the country is working to replicate that success with a different set of minerals.
Minerals minister Bogolo Kenewendo says the country has only explored 30% of its land, which she frames as an opportunity rather than a gap. The government is pursuing copper, manganese, platinum, chrome, and gold, with a target of starting new mines and increasing production between now and 2028. A state exploration company is being planned to build a geological database and attract investors, compressing the timeline from exploration to production.
New legislation, including the Mines and Minerals Amendment Act, is designed to enable small-scale mining and set clearer standards for environmental rehabilitation. The government is also introducing carbon credits and renewable energy certificates to push mines toward cleaner operations.
The $8 trillion question
The Africa Finance Corporation estimates the continent hosts approximately $29.5 trillion in mine site mineral value, with over $8 trillion of that remaining undeveloped. The African Union's Africa Minerals Vision is designed to coordinate policy across governments and ensure that the development of those assets happens on terms that benefit Africans.
The gap between potential and reality remains large. Infrastructure deficits, financing costs, ESG scrutiny from international investors, and competition from other resource regions all create friction. But the combination of surging global demand and growing political will to capture more value locally is shifting the terms of the conversation.
The minerals are there. The world needs them urgently. What Africa is insisting on, with increasing confidence, is that this time the terms of the deal look different.