How Africa can unlock capital for mineral value addition and regional value chains

Africa’s mineral sector is once again under immense pressure amid heightened demand driven by the global low-carbon agenda and competition for control. Africa stands yet again at a decisive inflection point, where it can seize this moment to capture value from its mineral resources. 

The Africa Mining Vision (2009) and the African Green Minerals Strategy (2025), which are the strategic foundational documents that champion and advocate a paradigm shift from a pure extraction model to one of value capture for African citizens, position minerals as drivers of industrialization, regional integration, and inclusive growth. 

To unlock capital to achieve this mostly elusive value capture, available capital must be unlocked, whose structure and source will need to be reevaluated and transformed. Financing for critical energy-transition minerals, or green minerals, is available in principle. It is, however, increasingly selective, targeting areas that offer regulatory and physical stability, policy clarity, and credible pathways to value addition rather than raw extraction. Aligning capital with Africa’s ambition to add value to minerals and build regional value chains has proven much more challenging than attracting capital.  

This shift and urgency are in line with the March 2026 Magaliesberg communiqué by a group of eminent experts drawn from governments, civil society, selected organizations and institutions, think tanks, academia, and the private sector, which calls for a continental shift toward value addition, regional industrialization, and collective bargaining power. It further underscores that financing value chains must be regional by design. Unlocking capital must therefore focus on financing integrated, cross-border industrial ecosystems.

To unlock the right type of capital in Africa, the following actionable recommendations are strongly recommended.

First, it would be prudent and strategic for African governments to diversify their sources of capital and adopt a regional approach when soliciting or acquiring capital. Given that historically, investment in the mining industry was largely dominated by foreign capital, African governments should now focus on mobilizing domestic capital. These may include pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and local capital focused on upstream and midstream processing for manufacturing and industrialization.  

Simultaneously, governments should continue to appeal to African development finance institutions such as Afreximbank, the African Development Bank, and the Africa Finance Corporation to finance regional value chain projects, including infrastructure and mineral corridors.