Green Industrialization in Africa: Adding Value to Critical Minerals through Regional Collaboration

Africa holds about 30 percent of global proven critical resource mineral (CRM) supplies but primarily exports them in raw form. The document identifies significant barriers to domestic value addition—including technical capacity, infrastructure, and investment gaps—and posits that regional collaboration is the only viable way to achieve the scale necessary for competitive downstream processing amid rising global demand for the energy and digital transitions.

• Africa possesses approximately 30 percent of the world's proven critical resource mineral (CRM) supplies, yet these are frequently exported in raw form to China, the European Union, and the United States, preventing the region from fully realizing the resources' potential.
• African nations face several systemic obstacles to establishing mineral processing facilities, specifically inadequate geological knowledge, poor infrastructure, limited investment and technology access, and a lack of technical capacity.
• Due to a lack of individual national capacity and insufficient scale to make downstream processing competitive, regional collaboration is necessary to develop green value chains, especially as demand for CRMs increases for digital and energy transitions in advanced countries.

APA

Webmaster (2025). Green Industrialization in Africa: Adding Value to Critical Minerals through Regional Collaboration. African Center for Economic Transformation. https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/insights-ideas/policy-briefs/green-industrialization-in-africa-adding-value-to-critical-minerals-through-regional-collaboration/

Chicago

Webmaster. Green Industrialization in Africa: Adding Value to Critical Minerals through Regional Collaboration. African Center for Economic Transformation, 2025. https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/insights-ideas/policy-briefs/green-industrialization-in-africa-adding-value-to-critical-minerals-through-regional-collaboration/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Webmaster |title=Green Industrialization in Africa: Adding Value to Critical Minerals through Regional Collaboration |publisher=African Center for Economic Transformation |date=5 December 2025 |url=https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/insights-ideas/policy-briefs/green-industrialization-in-africa-adding-value-to-critical-minerals-through-regional-collaboration/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{webmaster2025green, author = {Webmaster}, title = {{Green Industrialization in Africa: Adding Value to Critical Minerals through Regional Collaboration}}, institution = {African Center for Economic Transformation}, year = {2025}, month = dec, url = {https://acetforafrica.org/research-and-analysis/insights-ideas/policy-briefs/green-industrialization-in-africa-adding-value-to-critical-minerals-through-regional-collaboration/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }