Africa’s mineral wealth will remain a gift to others for as long as the continent continues to govern it with analogue tools in a digital age. That is the central provocation running through the third paper in Bright Simons’ mineral strategy trilogy, which shifts from diagnosing design flaws to proposing a concrete path toward regional coordination, computable governance, and sovereign data infrastructure.
Simons, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Honorary Vice President of the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education in Ghana, argues in his paper “Getting Smart about Africa’s Mineral Wealth” that the continent’s mineral future will not be defined solely by what lies beneath the surface, but by how effectively it governs, shares, and monetises the information required to discover and evaluate those resources.
The paper’s most immediately actionable proposal is also its most counterintuitive: do not start with gold or lithium. Start with feldspar. The industrial mineral is fiscally significant but not politically explosive, making it an ideal testing ground for encoding fiscal regulations in machine-readable, version-controlled code alongside legal text. Royalties are computed automatically. Compliance becomes auditable in real time. Policy drift is minimised. If the experiment works at this lower level of political stakes, the model can be expanded progressively to the minerals that matter most.
The framework Simons proposes would turn mineral governance from a declaratory exercise into a computable one. Royalty calculations could be automated. Enforcement would become transparent. And geological data itself would be elevated to strategic infrastructure through what he terms a National Data Cloud, under sovereign control, allowing African states to retain ownership of geological intelligence rather than allowing foreign artificial intelligence systems to extract value from fragmented, poorly curated datasets.
The regional dimension is equally important. West Africa’s patchwork of fiscal regimes has historically created gaps that mining companies exploit through under-invoicing and jurisdictional arbitrage. Harmonising digital rules across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) would close those gaps, align incentives across borders, and give investors and civil society a consistent, transparent framework to evaluate.
Simons introduced the concept of “Katanomics” to describe the structural fracture between political ambition, policy design, and execution that he argues pervades African mineral governance. Ghana’s Ewoyaa Lithium Project illustrates the problem: political messaging promised historic value capture, but the fiscal instruments deployed were crude tools unfit for a digital economy, including a sliding royalty scale that contained what he describes as a “Cliff Effect,” a mathematical distortion where a US$10 rise in price could trigger a disproportionate tax jump, incentivising companies to suppress declared revenues artificially.
Simons was appointed co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Development Council in October 2025 alongside ODI chief Sara Pantuliano, a recognition of his rising global influence in development policy circles. His trilogy, first conceived during a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, represents one of the most systematic attempts to translate that influence into operational policy design.
The argument’s core remains consistent across all three papers: the minerals beneath Africa’s soil are finite, but the intelligence needed to govern them wisely is not. The continent’s competitive advantage in the twenty-first century will not come from digging deeper. It will come from governing smarter, sharing geological knowledge across borders, and building digital infrastructure that converts raw data into sovereign economic power.
