Turkey’s Strategic Push for Africa’s Minerals and Potential EU Collaboration

Turkey is aggressively expanding its presence in Africa's critical minerals sector to support its domestic defence, electric vehicle, and renewable energy industries. While Turkey employs a pragmatic, commercially driven approach—often coupling mining with defence cooperation in volatile regions like the Sahel—the paper argues that aligning Turkish commercial agility with EU financial instruments and ESG standards through the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) could create more sustainable, trilateral value chains that benefit African host nations.

• Turkey's push for African critical raw materials (CRMs) is driven by the needs of its strategic autonomy and specific industrial sectors, including the defence industry's requirement for rare earth elements (REEs) and specialised alloys, and the electric vehicle sector's demand for lithium and nickel, exemplified by the TOGG initiative.
• Turkey employs a dual-track strategy to secure minerals: enhancing domestic capacity, such as the 2020 launch of a lithium-extraction plant and the establishment of an REE Research Institute, and expanding international partnerships, having signed energy and mining agreements with at least 17 African countries since 2016.
• Turkish engagement in Africa follows three distinct modalities: direct extraction for Turkish domestic use (e.g., MNG Gold in Liberia); integrated production that creates local value chains (e.g., Tosyalı Holding's steel plant in Algeria); and the coupling of mining with security and defence cooperation in high-volatility regions like Niger, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
• There is a significant divergence between the EU's and Turkey's approaches to minerals; the EU prioritises binding environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, whereas Turkey uses a pragmatic, commercially oriented approach with a legal framework amended 25 times between 1985 and 2020 to fast-track permits.
• The author proposes that the EU and Turkey leverage the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) to launch trilateral initiatives with African states like the DRC, Zambia, and Namibia, combining EU financing (such as the Global Gateway) with Turkish engineering and commercial agility.

APA

Yaşar, N. T. (2025). Turkey’s Strategic Push for Africa’s Minerals and Potential EU Collaboration. Africa Policy Research Institute. https://afripoli.org/turkeys-strategic-push-for-africas-minerals-and-potential-eu-collaboration

Chicago

Yaşar, Nebahat Tanrıverdi. Turkey’s Strategic Push for Africa’s Minerals and Potential EU Collaboration. Africa Policy Research Institute, 2025. https://afripoli.org/turkeys-strategic-push-for-africas-minerals-and-potential-eu-collaboration.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Yaşar |first1=Nebahat Tanrıverdi |title=Turkey’s Strategic Push for Africa’s Minerals and Potential EU Collaboration |publisher=Africa Policy Research Institute |date=18 June 2025 |url=https://afripoli.org/turkeys-strategic-push-for-africas-minerals-and-potential-eu-collaboration |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{yaar2025turkeys, author = {Yaşar, Nebahat Tanrıverdi}, title = {{Turkey’s Strategic Push for Africa’s Minerals and Potential EU Collaboration}}, institution = {Africa Policy Research Institute}, year = {2025}, month = jun, url = {https://afripoli.org/turkeys-strategic-push-for-africas-minerals-and-potential-eu-collaboration}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }