PAYNE INSTITUTE COMMENTARY SERIES: COMMENTARY

By Clarkson Kamurai, Richard Gabah, and Isabel Guajardo

June 25, 2026

Abstract

Advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI), and many other technologies are fundamentally dependent on mineral inputs. Africa is emerging as an important partner given its vast critical mineral endowment and increasing openness to foreign investment.

China has already established a strong position on the continent by integrating infrastructure investment with mining operations, linking extraction sites to ports and global markets through bundled financing, construction, and offtake agreements. In contrast, western engagement has often underperformed, prioritizing its own supply security over local economic development.

This article argues that the primary unit of competition is not the individual mine, but the integrated “mineral corridor”. It describes a novel system that combines logistics, energy, and processing infrastructure into a unified investment framework. The U.S. and its allies must move beyond outdated extractive models and support genuine African industrialization through regional specialization. Embedding beneficiation with corridor development, the U.S. and allies can help deliver fiscal stability, job creation, and long-term skills transfer, ensuring sustained value creation for both Africa and Western partners.

1. Introduction: Africa’s Strategic Endowment and the Western Opportunity

Africa’s critical mineral endowment is among the most significant in the world. Its high-quality reserves of copper, cobalt, manganese, graphite, lithium, rare earths, and platinum group metals (PGMs) are already central to advanced manufacturing and the global energy transition (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2025). The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia alone are projected to produce over 4 million tonnes of copper by 2026, and the DRC accounts for over 50% of global cobalt output. South Africa and Zimbabwe together possess nearly 70% of global PGM reserves, critical for auto-catalyst, electronics, and hydrogen technology.

Figure 1: Potential Critical Minerals Clusters in Africa – B20 South Africa / World Economic Forum

Yet Africa’s mineral wealth remains largely unprocessed before export. The strategic question for Western countries is not whether Africa will supply critical minerals—it will. The question is whether the U.S. and its allies can become the preferred partners for building investable projects and resilient supply chains.

This requires understanding how African governments themselves define what matters. There is a fundamental divergence between how producer and consumer nations think about mineral criticality. The United States and European Union (EU) define it through supply chain security: geopolitical risk, import dependence, and susceptibility to price shocks. Producer countries in Southern Africa frame it differently—through economic contribution, export revenue, employment, and the role a mineral play in domestic industrialization. South Africa’s 2025 Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy, for example, designates PGMs, manganese, and vanadium as “high criticality” because of their domestic economic significance, while lithium and copper—globally prioritized by consuming nations—are rated only moderately critical.

Any partnership framework that imposes a Western definition of criticality will misalign with the priorities of the countries it seeks to engage. African governments are sovereign actors with their own industrial strategies. A credible Western strategy must begin with this recognition.

That recognition must also be paired with an honest reckoning with history. The legacy of the extractive colonial model—exemplified by the brutal exploitation of the Congo under King Leopold II—left behind infrastructure designed solely for export rather than internal growth. Today, this legacy manifests in three persistent investment blockers:

• The Energy Deficit: Power tariffs in many African nations remain well above global industrial benchmarks, making high-heat processing unviable.
• Infrastructure Gaps: Many deposits remain “stranded” in inland regions lacking rail and transmission connectivity.
• Human Capital Shortfalls: A trained workforce capable of managing advanced mining, chemical processing, and metallurgical refining at scale is a critical missing link—though less so in Southern Africa, where countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia have large mining enterprises run entirely by local staff.

This article argues that the unit of competition for Africa’s critical minerals is not the mine or the bilateral supply agreement. It is the integrated mineral corridor: not merely a transport link between mine and port, but a regional production system that combines logistics, energy, processing, and governance into a single investable proposition. Until the U.S. and allies move in this direction, even well-funded initiatives will reproduce the extractive model they claim to replace. This is more likely to happen if the U.S. and its allies support African priorities like industrialization, jobs, and fiscal stability (Business Human Rights Org)

The remainder of this paper follows the following sequence; section 2 gives an overview on the Chinese critical minerals procurement model – (vertical integration from mine to battery), while section 3 focusses on a new model for possible Western engagement with Africa broken into three subsections:

1. Lobito —export pipeline vs. industrial belt, and the geopolitical pressures it faces.
2. Beneficiation / Midstream — the economic case, the regional specialization logic, and the Indonesia/Philippines cautionary tale.
3. The Three-Pillar Agenda — the concrete policy proposals

Finally, Section 4 concludes providing a tight wrap on the integration argument and the real measure of success.

2. The Chinese Model: Integrated, Bundled, and Dominant

Any thoughtful discussion of African mineral strategy must begin with China—because China’s approach simultaneously defines the competitive benchmark and shapes the structural constraints within which African ambitions must operate.

Chinese state-owned and private firms now control over half of global critical minerals production and an estimated 87% of processing and refining (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2025). China produces nearly 70% of rare earth minerals and is responsible for 95% of heavy rare earth processing. In the DRC alone, Chinese firms own or hold stakes in fifteen of the nineteen major cobalt mines (Atlantic Council, Nov 2025). This vertical integration—from mine to refinery to battery factory—gives China pricing power and supply chain control that no single Western initiative currently matches. See Exhibit 1.

China’s competitive advantage does not rest on mining alone. Chinese firms bundle infrastructure construction, financing, and offtake into integrated packages that are extremely attractive to cash-strapped governments, particularly in remote regions with limited existing infrastructure. The Chinese consortium’s success in outbidding Australia’s Fortescue for Guinea’s Simandou iron ore concessions was driven not by the mining offer itself, but by Beijing’s commitment to build railways, shipping infrastructure, and related projects in the surrounding region. This bundled approach is precisely what Western countries have historically failed to replicate. This integrated, bundled model: vertical integration from mine to battery or precursors, also provide a key insight on China’s ambivalence on full beneficiation.

Exhibit 1

While Chinese firms may build partial processing facilities in host countries—converting ore to intermediate chemical products, for example—the highest-value refining and manufacturing steps remain tied to China. Beijing’s current policies restrict the export of high-end processing technologies, particularly those related to heavy rare earth elements and dual-use minerals (China-Global South Project, Jun 2025). Even where African governments demand local beneficiation, the structural result is often that Africa processes minerals to an intermediate stage while the most profitable stages of the value chain continue to be captured in Chinese industrial zones that benefit from state-subsidized energy, advanced automation, and massive economies of scale.

For Western policymakers, the lesson is twofold. First, mine-level agreements alone will never compete with China’s integrated model. The U.S. and allies must match the bundled approach—combining infrastructure, energy, finance, and offtake into comprehensive packages rather than offering piecemeal support. Second, the West has an opportunity to differentiate itself on precisely the dimension where China falls short: genuine support for African-controlled beneficiation that keeps more of the value chain on the continent, rather than redirecting it to processing facilities elsewhere (The Diplomat, Feb 2026).

3. Toward a New Model: Corridors, Beneficiation, and Regional Integration

The following section outlines what a genuine alternative to the Chinese model could look like—drawing on the Lobito Corridor as a concrete reference point, making the case for midstream processing as the critical strategic lever, and proposing a coordinated three-pillar agenda for mineral-led industrialization.

3.1 The Lobito Corridor: Lessons and Limitations

The Lobito Corridor is the most prominent example of a Western-backed corridor initiative in Africa and provides a critical benchmark for the framework advanced in this article. The 1,300-kilometer rail and infrastructure project stretches from the Angolan port of Lobito to mining regions in the DRC and Zambia, backed by over $10 billion in investment pledges from the United States, European Union, African Development Bank, and private sector consortia (OECD, 2025). The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation signed a $553 million loan in late 2025 to rehabilitate the Angolan railway (Reuters, Dec 2025), while the Africa Finance Corporation is leading a new greenfield rail extension into Zambia.

The Corridor’s promise is real. It is designed to reduce transit times from weeks to days, cut transport costs by up to 30%, and increase freight capacity tenfold to 4.6 million tonnes per year (Ecofin Agency, 2025). It provides a faster Atlantic export route for landlocked copper and cobalt producers. Operational proof of concept came in 2024, when Ivanhoe Mines completed a trial shipment of copper from Kolwezi in the DRC to the Port of Lobito in just six days (Afripoli, 2025). See Exhibit 2

Exhibit 2

However, the Lobito Corridor also illustrates the gap between infrastructure ambition and beneficiation reality. In its current form, the corridor risks functioning primarily as an export pipeline for raw materials—an efficient route from mine to port, but not fundamentally different from the extractive model it claims to replace (APRI: Lobito Corridor—A Reality Check, The Conversation, Feb 2026; Devex, Dec 2024). The corridor’s business model currently depends heavily on a single mining operator, Ivanhoe Mines, a company with significant Chinese investment. Meanwhile, China has simultaneously secured control over the competing TAZARA (Tanzania Zambia Rail Authority) railway linking Zambia, Tanzania, and the DRC to the East African coast, ensuring that Chinese-owned mines retain alternative export options regardless of the Lobito Corridor’s success (The Red Folder, Feb 2026).

The Lobito case also faces geopolitical uncertainty. Broader development assistance programs along the corridor have faced cuts, and the wider shift in U.S. minerals policy toward bilateral security agreements and strategic stockpiling—rather than multilateral development partnerships—raises questions about whether the holistic corridor-plus-beneficiation model can be sustained. Much of the current mineral output from the Central African Copperbelt is financed by Chinese capital and exits the continent along the east board through Dar es Salaam, Nacala, Beira, or Maputo.

For the framework proposed here, the Lobito Corridor is both an encouraging precedent and a cautionary example. It demonstrates that Western governments can mobilize corridor-scale infrastructure financing. But it also shows that without deliberate integration of energy investment, processing capacity, and regional industrial planning into the corridor design from the outset, even well-financed infrastructure risks reproducing extractive patterns rather than transforming them.

3.2 Beneficiation as a Strategic Priority: The Case for Midstream Focus

Beneficiation—the processing, refining, and upgrading of raw minerals into higher-value products before export—is not merely a sub-theme of corridor development. It is a distinct strategic priority that must be addressed on its own terms. African governments have made this clear through policy action: since 2023, at least thirteen African countries have enacted export restrictions on unprocessed minerals (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2025), and the DRC, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa have all moved to require greater domestic value addition before minerals leave the continent.

The economic logic is compelling. Exporting copper concentrate from Zambia generates roughly $4,500 per tonne in revenue at current prices. Processing that same ore domestically into refined cathode captures closer to $8,800 per tonne—before accounting for metallurgical byproducts like cobalt, gold, and silver that are often undervalued in concentrate form (Skillings Mining Review, Indaba 2026). At Zambia’s projected 2026 output of roughly 850,000 tons of copper, this represents approximately $3.7 billion in incremental annual value that could remain in-country rather than accruing to smelters in China, Japan, or South Korea. See Exhibit 3

Exhibit 3

Yet beneficiation cannot be achieved through policy mandates alone. It requires reliable and affordable energy, water, logistics, technical skills, and market access—prerequisites that are rarely found in sufficient concentration within a single country. This is why beneficiation must be understood as a regional undertaking, tied to corridor infrastructure and cross-border economic integration, rather than a national one.

Africa’s mineral value chains are likely to develop through regional specialization. The Southern African Development Community (SADC), anchored by the Zambia-DRC Copperbelt, Zimbabwe-Namibia lithium, and South Africa-Zimbabwe PGMs, has natural advantages in ferro-alloys and transition energy production input processing. West Africa has emerged as a major gold-producing region and could develop refining, trading, and financial services hubs supported by coastal logistics networks. East Africa presents emerging opportunities in graphite and rare earth supply chains. North Africa benefits from established industrial zones and export connectivity to European markets.

The pathway to equitable outcomes lies in treating regional blocs as integrated economic systems (NRGI, 2025): one country may contribute mineral feedstock, another may offer hydroelectric capacity for processing, and a third may provide port logistics and industrial zones for final product assembly. Each member state captures a portion of the value chain commensurate with its comparative advantage, even if no single country hosts every stage of production. Fig 1 shows these blocks and the economic roles they could play in an intra-continent value addition collaboration.

SADC countries must avoid the trap of duplicating processing capacity in a race to beneficiate independently. The experience of Indonesia and the Philippines in nickel processing offers a cautionary parallel: when neighboring producer countries build competing smelters for the same mineral without coordination, they erode each other’s bargaining power and create overcapacity that depresses returns for all (Resource Policy, Dec 2021). Instead, SADC states should leverage their collective market power. South Africa and Zimbabwe together supply close to 70% of global PGMs—a concentration of leverage that could drive onshore value addition much as Indonesia’s nickel export ban forced Chinese smelter investment onshore. The emerging Kalahari Copper Belt, combined with the existing Central African Copperbelt, would position SADC ahead of South America as the world’s dominant copper region, but only if these endowments are treated as a single integrated production system.

3.3 A New Approach: The Three-Pillar Agenda for Mineral-Led Industrialization

Building on the foregoing analysis, a coordinated three-pillar agenda is needed to operationalize the shift from resource corridors to integrated production systems.

Pillar 1: Integrated Corridor Systems — Infrastructure, Energy, and Beneficiation

Corridors must be designed as production systems, not as transport routes with processing added later. This requires integrating rail, ports, power generation, transmission infrastructure, border systems, and industrial processing zones into a single investment package. The goal is that by the time mined ore reaches the port, it has been transformed into refined metal, battery precursors, or other transition energy materials ready for manufacturing.

The energy dimension is inseparable from the logistics dimension. A corridor that moves ore faster but does not address the power deficit simply accelerates extraction without enabling value addition. Western corridor investment must treat affordable energy as a precondition, not a parallel workstream.

Policy actions:

1. Design corridor packages that integrate transport, power, border systems, and processing zones as a single proposition, rather than funding isolated segments.
2. Use blended finance to crowd in private capital for enabling assets, particularly power generation and transmission along corridor routes.
3. Anchor processing investments through credible offtake arrangements with Western battery manufacturers and industrial buyers, providing the demand signal that makes beneficiation bankable.
4. Tie corridor support to transparent procurement, public reporting of costs, and clear community impact commitments.
5. Fund technical assistance for permitting, geological data, and contract management to improve project quality at each node.
6. Deploy DFC guarantees, insurance, and credit enhancement to de-risk anchor assets; EXIM financing for power, processing, and industrial equipment; MCC support for transmission, ports, and border systems.

Pillar 2: Regional Coordination and Market Power

No single SADC country possesses all the ingredients for a complete competitive mineral value chain. The commercially efficient pathway to beneficiation runs through regional blocs that function as integrated economic systems, with each member state contributing its comparative advantage while retaining political sovereignty.

This requires active coordination to prevent two failure modes. The first is internal fragmentation, where neighboring countries duplicate processing capacity and erode each other’s bargaining power. The second is external fragmentation, where Western partners pursue structurally different bilateral agreements with individual countries for the same mineral, dividing regional leverage rather than reinforcing it.

Policy actions:

7. Support regional beneficiation compacts that allocate processing roles based on comparative advantage, ensuring each country captures a meaningful share of value chain returns.
8. Align bilateral mineral supply agreements with regional economic strategies so that they reinforce corridor logic rather than fragment it.
9. Establish a regional critical minerals coordination platform within SADC to harmonize definitions, share geological data, and coordinate investment planning.
10. Create value addition compacts that bundle upstream investment with targeted processing, workforce training, and supplier development across corridor countries.

Pillar 3: Governance, Institutional Capacity, and Execution

In fragile and developing states, the investment environment is shaped by legitimacy, regulatory predictability, and the capacity of institutions to manage complex cross-border projects. A Western minerals strategy must integrate governance strengthening and security cooperation in ways that build state capacity rather than substitute for it.

Speed and certainty matter because China moves from commitment to construction faster than Western institutions, and this is a persistent source of its appeal, in part supported by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But speed is an outcome of removing institutional bottlenecks, not a standalone goal. Policy design must account for this honestly by standardizing tools, sequencing approvals, and concentrating resources on a smaller number of priority corridors rather than spreading effort thin.

Policy actions:

11. Expand political risk insurance, credit enhancement, and first-loss structures through simplified, standardized tools deployable quickly across priority projects.
12. Support coordinated cross-border approval pathways so that projects spanning multiple jurisdictions are not delayed by fragmented decision-making.
13. Provide catalytic grant funding for feasibility work in power, water, and midstream infrastructure where private capital will not enter first.
14. Support customs modernization and anti-smuggling systems to protect formal revenues and reduce illicit flows.
15. Fund community development agreements, grievance mechanisms, and local supplier development as built-in components of project finance, not optional additions.
16. Coordinate targeted financial enforcement against opaque concessioning and coercive resource capture, while offering accountable security partnerships focused on state capacity and infrastructure protection.

4. Conclusion

Africa’s mineral wealth is on the cusp of playing a defining role in the global energy transition, and the competition to shape those supply chains is already underway. Western countries will not secure reliable access to African minerals through mine-level agreements alone. What is required is a bundled approach that treats infrastructure corridors, affordable energy systems, value addition compacts, governance frameworks, and offtake arrangements as components of a single investable ecosystem—rather than as separate policy lines pursued by separate agencies on separate timelines. This is what China’s approach demonstrates, and it is the standard against which Western engagement will invariably be judged.

The failure mode is not that Western engagement will be refused. It is that it will be accepted but prove insufficient. African countries will sign agreements, welcome financing for rail and ports, and still find themselves exporting raw materials to processing facilities located elsewhere, capturing only a fraction of the value their resources generate. Avoiding this outcome requires three things: deliberate integration of beneficiation into corridor design from the outset; honest acknowledgment that not every country will host every stage of the value chain, but every country must benefit from it; and sustained commitment to the energy infrastructure that makes processing commercially viable.

For the United States and its Western allies, the challenge is not a lack of instruments but a lack of integration in how those instruments are deployed. Financing tools, development banks, and security partnerships exist at scale, but remain too often fragmented across agencies, timelines, and bilateral deals that do not reinforce a common corridor strategy. The strategic test is whether these actors can shift from transactional engagement to coordinated, system-building investment at corridor level.

Ultimately, the measure of success is not the volume of agreements signed, but whether they generate diversified industrial activity, expand skilled employment, and retain a greater share of value on the continent—laying the foundations for durable and broad-based economic transformation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Clarkson Kamurai, Payne Institute Critical Minerals Program Manager and Research Associate
Clarkson is a Critical Minerals Program Manager and Research Associate for the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. A mining engineer with over 20 years of experience, he holds a keen interest in Mining Process Continual Improvement tracking and energy metal developments, decarbonisation and circularity especially in the energy materials space. He is currently enrolled in the Energy and Mineral Economics Division at the Colorado School of Mines and about to start his PhD studies related to critical minerals supply chain, an area he has a deep passion for.

Richard Gabah, SSR Mining Inc.
Richard Gabah is a mining finance and capital allocation professional focused on Life of Mine valuation, critical minerals, and investment decision-making. Currently working at SSR Mining in Denver Colorado and previously worked with Standard Bank Group on mining finance, jurisdictional risk, and natural resources investment research. He holds an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and is a Chartered Global Management Accountant.

Isabel Guajardo, Payne Institute Critical Minerals Research Associate
Isabel Guajardo is a Critical Minerals Research Associate at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. With a Master of Science in Mineral and Energy Economics from Mines, and over a decade of experience in the copper mining and logistics sectors, her work focuses on economic and policy analysis of critical mineral supply chains in global markets.

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