Delegates from more than a dozen African countries opened a three-day continental mining labour summit in Accra on Thursday, with calls for unified action to ensure that Africa’s rapidly rising mineral wealth translates into genuine economic gains for the continent’s workers and citizens.
The 3rd Executive Council Meeting of the African Federation of Miners and Mineral Wealth (AFMMW), hosted by the Ghana Mineworkers’ Union (GMWU) at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel, brings together union leaders from Ghana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Mali, Tanzania, Egypt and other African nations. The gathering runs from March 26 to 28, 2026.
The meeting is convened under the theme “Strengthening Unity and Solidarity Among the African Unions of Mines to Confront the New Global Order and Attempts to Control Natural Resources and Rare Minerals,” a framing that reflects growing continental anxiety over the intensifying global scramble for African resources.
The opening session was addressed by Abdul-Moomin Gbana, General Secretary of GMWU; AFMMW President Joseph Chewe; and AFMMW Secretary General Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Halim. Dr. Abdul-Rashid Hassan Pelpuo, Minister of Labour, Jobs and Employment, delivered the keynote address, while Kwesi Pratt Jnr, General Secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, served as guest speaker.
The timing is deliberate. Global demand for cobalt, lithium, graphite, coltan, nickel and rare earth elements is surging as electric vehicle manufacturers, renewable energy developers and semiconductor producers compete to lock in long-term supply. Analysts estimate Africa holds roughly 30 percent of the world’s critical mineral reserves, yet the overwhelming majority of those resources leave the continent in raw or semi-processed form, with value addition and industrial development occurring elsewhere.
At the federation’s previous executive board meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, the AFMMW resolved to establish an investment company focused on acquiring and managing mining assets across the continent, a decision aimed at ensuring African mineworkers and citizens benefit directly from the continent’s mineral wealth. The Accra meeting is expected to take concrete steps toward implementing that and other commitments made in Lusaka.
The AFMMW was established on February 27, 2024 in Cairo, Egypt, as the umbrella body for African workers in the mining and mineral sector at the continental level, with its central objective being to unite all mineworkers to ensure that natural resources serve the benefit of the African people.
Over the next two days, delegates are expected to deliberate on strategies to combat the casualisation of mining labour, enforce occupational health and safety standards, promote union participation in mining value chains, and advocate for policies that mandate local processing and industrial development. The federation has also signalled it will pursue an aggressive membership recruitment drive to bring more national unions under its continental umbrella.
For the workers gathered in Accra, the discussions are framed as more than a labour negotiation. They represent an attempt to reposition African mineworkers not merely as extractors of raw materials but as stakeholders in the industrial and economic value their labour helps generate, at a moment when the global economy’s next chapter increasingly depends on what lies beneath African soil.
