When Ghana’s Labour Minister Dr. Abdul-Rashid Pelpuo stood before delegates at the African Federation of Miners and Mineral Wealth (AFMMW) meeting in Accra on Wednesday, his message was blunt: Africa holds the resources the world needs most, yet its communities remain among the least developed on earth.
The numbers frame the paradox sharply. The continent holds an estimated 30 percent of the world’s critical mineral reserves, including over 55 percent of global cobalt, around 44 percent of global manganese, significant platinum-group metal deposits, and fast-growing lithium discoveries. Despite this endowment, Africa captures less than 1 percent of global mineral value addition.
That gap is what Pelpuo described as the continent’s central economic challenge. Africa’s cobalt, lithium, and rare earths are extracted, shipped overseas, processed into batteries and turbines, and sold back to African markets at a steep premium. The wealth generated flows largely outward.
The pressure to change this is intensifying. Forecasts indicate that global demand for minerals critical to clean technologies could increase up to five-fold by 2035 compared to 2023 levels, making Africa’s reserves more strategically valuable than at any previous point in modern history. The rivalry for access to Africa’s vital resources has escalated sharply among multinational firms, foreign investors, and major economies including China, the United States, and European Union members.
Several African governments have begun pushing back against raw export dependency. Zimbabwe imposed export limits on unprocessed lithium and has continued enforcing them into 2026 to compel domestic processing. Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have explored joint ventures aimed at expanding battery production capacity in the region.
Regional integration is increasingly cited as the structural solution. Full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could boost intra-African trade by up to 45 percent by 2045 and add 1.2 percent to continental gross domestic product. The agreement’s rules of origin provisions, which allow minerals from one African country to be processed in another and still qualify for preferential trade terms, are seen as a key mechanism for building cross-border industrial value chains.
Analysts at the Brookings Institution have argued that African countries need a coordinated, whole-of-government approach to critical minerals, integrating mining, energy, infrastructure, and value-chain policy under a single national framework, with the authority to engage regional partners and leverage AfCFTA’s potential.
The AFMMW meeting, which runs until Friday, March 28, gathers union leaders from across the continent to translate these broad principles into organised labour strategy, ensuring that royalties, local employment, and fair working conditions are embedded in future mining agreements rather than negotiated after the fact.
As Pelpuo put it in Accra: Africa’s resources are the world’s future. The question is whether the continent will finally be at the centre of that future, or once again supply it from the margins.
