The Case:
In 2025, Africa consolidated its position as the world’s most strategically significant growth frontier for critical minerals. From cobalt and copper to lithium, graphite, and rare earths, African countries increasingly sat at the center of global supply ambitions. This expansion was driven by geology, rising global demand, and intensified competition among external actors seeking long-term access.
Yet Africa’s growing importance also
highlighted a central tension: while mineral scale and leverage increased, governance capacity and value capture remained uneven. The continent’s role expanded faster than the institutions designed to manage it.
The Facts:
At the start of 2025, Africa already supplied a dominant share of several critical minerals essential to energy transition and advanced manufacturing. Throughout the year, investment announcements and bilateral agreements multiplied, involving actors from China, the United States, Europe, and the Gulf.
By mid-year, governments across the continent emphasized local value addition, tighter licensing, and greater state participation. Several countries signaled ambitions to move downstream into processing and refining, while enforcement against illicit extraction and smuggling intensified selectively.
In the second half of the year, structural constraints became more visible. Infrastructure gaps, regulatory fragmentation, security risks, and limited administrative capacity slowed implementation. While production continued to grow in key jurisdictions, value capture remained concentrated upstream. By December, Africa’s strategic relevance was undisputed—but so were the limits of translating mineral wealth into sustained institutional and developmental gains.
Why This Case Was Important in 2025
Africa mattered in 2025 because it exposed the global system’s dependence on jurisdictions with high geological potential but uneven governance capacity. As competition for supply intensified, Africa became both indispensable and vulnerable—central to diversification strategies yet exposed to asymmetric bargaining power. The case also underscored a recurring pattern: mineral abundance alone does not guarantee leverage.
Where institutions lagged, external actors captured disproportionate value. Where governance frameworks strengthened, negotiating power improved—but slowly. Africa illustrated that the next phase of the critical minerals race will be shaped as much by institutional development as by resource endowment.