Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says the rush around Africa’s critical minerals offers an unusual opening. The real test is whether governments can turn new deals into regional industries and lasting economic value, reports Jon Offei-Ansah
Keypoints:
- Critical-mineral agreements are multiplying
- Regional value chains could capture more
- Africa must turn leverage into industry
AFRICA’S critical-minerals opportunity is being negotiated now, agreement by agreement, as governments race to secure resources that are becoming indispensable to global industry.
That was the striking starting point of WTO Director-General Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s intervention at Unstoppable Africa 2026 in New York earlier this week.
She drew attention to the growing number of agreements appearing across the global trading system as governments respond to geopolitical tensions, supply-chain vulnerabilities and rising demand for strategic minerals.
The World Trade Organisation has documented more than 180 targeted trade arrangements focused on areas including digital trade and critical minerals by the end of 2024.
For Africa, all that activity can easily look like proof that the continent’s moment has arrived.
Okonjo-Iweala’s argument was more cautious. The real question is not how many deals are signed, but what Africa is able to build from them.
The real issue is value
Africa has supplied raw materials to the world for generations. Critical minerals could easily become another chapter in that familiar story unless countries negotiate differently.
The continent possesses cobalt, copper, lithium, graphite, manganese and other resources increasingly needed for electric vehicles, clean energy, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.
Yet owning what the world wants does not mean capturing most of its value.
Okonjo-Iweala kept returning to the need to ‘add value to our products’.
That may sound obvious, but it goes to the heart of the problem.
A mine can bring jobs, exports and tax revenue. Processing, refining, engineering, specialist services and manufacturing build something broader around the resource. They create skills, deepen local supply chains and give businesses a better chance of surviving beyond one commodity cycle.
The ambition, then, should not stop at getting a better price for what comes out of the ground.
Africa should be asking what industries can be built because those resources are there.
Supply chains are looking for new homes
The timing gives that argument unusual force.
Geopolitical tensions are pushing companies to reconsider production networks that became heavily concentrated in a handful of countries. Okonjo-Iweala said some global value chains are looking to ‘diversify and decentralise’.
Africa should be competing for some of that production.
Her instruction was emphatic: ‘seize the opportunity now’.
The urgency is understandable.
Companies looking for alternative locations will eventually make their choices. Plants will be built. Suppliers will gather around them. Skills, infrastructure and capital will follow.
Once those ecosystems are established elsewhere, they become much harder to move.
Critical minerals give African governments a stronger hand because investors seeking secure supplies need access to resources the continent possesses.
That changes the nature of the negotiation.
Instead of asking only how much an investor is prepared to spend on a mine, governments can ask what processing, manufacturing, infrastructure and technology might follow that investment.
Africa Briefing has previously examined how global competition is strengthening Africa’s hand in the critical-minerals race.
Okonjo-Iweala’s point goes a step further: leverage only becomes meaningful when it leaves behind productive capability.
Regional value chains offer another route
One of the most significant parts of her argument was the emphasis on regional value chains.
Okonjo-Iweala cited cooperation between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia as an example of what neighbouring mineral producers can do when they look beyond their own borders.
The case is compelling.
Congo dominates global cobalt production, while Zambia has enormous copper resources. Instead of treating those deposits only as separate national assets, the two countries have been working towards a joint battery and electric-vehicle value chain.
They signed a cooperation agreement in April 2022, followed in March 2023 by an agreement supporting special economic zones dedicated to battery precursors, batteries and electric vehicles.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) continues to support the DRC–Zambia battery and electric-vehicle initiative, including efforts to bring smaller African businesses into the emerging value chain.
This is a more realistic model than expecting every mineral-producing country to build an entire battery industry from scratch.
One economy might mine cobalt, another process copper, while another provides components, logistics, finance or assembly.
The point is not to keep every stage inside one national border.
It is to keep far more of the total economic value within Africa.
Scale can strengthen bargaining power
Regional production also addresses one of Africa’s long-standing industrial weaknesses: small and fragmented national markets.
A multibillion-dollar processing facility may make little sense when designed around one economy. The calculation changes when the same investment serves a larger regional market.
The DRC–Zambia approach therefore turns regional integration into something much more practical than diplomatic language.
It can also strengthen bargaining power.
Foreign companies often negotiate with individual African governments. Those governments may then find themselves competing against neighbours offering similar minerals, tax breaks or investment incentives.
A functioning regional value chain changes that proposition.
An investor is no longer looking only at a mine. It is looking at a wider production ecosystem.
That is the sort of value-chain thinking Okonjo-Iweala is pushing.
Congo shows leverage can move markets
Congo has already shown that critical-mineral leverage is real.
Its restrictions on cobalt exports tightened supply and helped push prices sharply higher. Reuters reported in June that cobalt prices had risen about 160 percent from February 2025 levels.
A policy decision in Kinshasa could therefore move an international market.
But higher cobalt prices are not the same thing as industrial transformation.
The more durable gain would be using that market strength to build processing capacity, infrastructure, expertise and competitive businesses around the resource.
Commodity leverage can disappear surprisingly quickly. Prices fall, new deposits emerge and technology changes.
Factories, skills and local supply networks tend to last longer.
Zimbabwe reveals the harder reality
Zimbabwe shows why moving up the value chain is easier to announce than to deliver.
Harare is trying to move its lithium industry beyond concentrate exports, with a ban planned from January 2027. Processing investment has begun to follow.
But Zimbabwe’s existing lithium-processing capacity has exposed practical constraints, including the inability of its operating lithium sulphate plant to process material from other miners.
Africa Briefing’s analysis of Zimbabwe’s lithium beneficiation strategy has highlighted the same tension.
A government can prohibit raw exports faster than companies can build competitive processing plants.
And factories cannot run on policy ambition alone.
They need reliable electricity, transport, finance, skilled workers, predictable regulation and markets large enough to justify expensive investment.
It also explains Okonjo-Iweala’s enthusiasm for regional value chains. Countries can specialise instead of trying to duplicate every stage of production.
AGOA provides a cautionary lesson
Later in the discussion, Okonjo-Iweala turned to Africa’s experience with preferential market access.
Her question about the African Growth and Opportunity Act was uncomfortable: ‘Has it materially increased our trade with the US?’
The underlying point was not that trade preferences have no value.
It was that an open market means much less when countries do not have enough competitive products to sell into it.
Africa’s trade with the United States has remained relatively modest despite years of preferential access under AGOA.
Okonjo-Iweala also pointed to China’s widening zero-tariff access for African economies.
Again, the question is what Africa will sell.
Market access can open the door. It cannot build the factory.
That is why the AGOA discussion connects so naturally to critical minerals.
Africa could possess strategic resources, gain preferential access to major markets and attract intense competition between global powers — and still capture too little of the economic upside if the continent does not make more sophisticated products.
Judge agreements by what remains
A useful way to judge the current wave of mineral agreements is therefore to look beyond the size of the investment announcement.
What remains in Africa after the resource is extracted?
Is it mainly a mine and an efficient route to a port?
Or does the investment leave processing plants, skilled workers, technology, infrastructure and African companies embedded further along the production chain?
A multibillion-dollar deal will always grab headlines. What matters more is the productive capacity that survives after the headlines fade.
Okonjo-Iweala is not suggesting Africa should pull away from global trade.
Her argument is almost the opposite.
The continent should use global demand for its resources to integrate more deeply into production.
And that production need not stop at national borders.
Congo and Zambia can combine assets. Other mineral-producing states can do the same. AfCFTA offers a wider market within which those regional industries can grow.
Africa Briefing has documented this broader shift as African governments increasingly rewrite the rules around critical minerals.
The harder part is turning policy ambition into functioning industry.
Africa has a window, not a guarantee
This is what gives Okonjo-Iweala’s message its urgency.
Africa possesses resources the world needs at precisely the moment global supply chains are being reconsidered.
That combination creates negotiating room that raw-material producers do not always enjoy.
But the advantage will not last forever.
New sources will emerge. Recycling will expand. Technologies will change. Supply chains now looking for new homes will eventually settle somewhere.
Africa therefore has a window in which to turn mineral access into processing, regional production networks and competitive African businesses.
The continent already has the minerals.
What it needs now is to make sure the agreements surrounding them produce something more durable than another export boom.
If Okonjo-Iweala’s argument is right, success will not be measured by how many deals Africa signs.
It will be measured by what Africa is still producing long after the current scramble has moved on.