Can the green energy transition deliver genuine development for mineral-rich African nations, or deepen dependency?
As economies accelerate their transition towards net zero, critical minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements have assumed greater strategic importance in the global economy. Just as twentieth-century geopolitics revolved around securing oil, the twenty-first increasingly revolves around securing the resources needed for clean energy. For many African producer states, this raises an important question: does the green transition create a genuine opportunity for industrial development, or simply repackage older extractive relationships in greener language? Crucially, can governments convert temporary geopolitical leverage into lasting industrial capability?
The Lobito Corridor — a 1,300 km railway linking Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia — is a useful lens for examining this question. Built in 1902 to transport minerals from Central Africa to global markets, the railway fell into disrepair after decades of regional conflict. Between 2004 and 2014, China financed its rehabilitation through a $1.2 billion oil-for-infrastructure loan, and has since deepened its presence across the region's mining sector while consolidating its dominance in mineral refining through the Belt and Road Initiative. The result is an hourglass-shaped global supply chain. Extraction is spread across dozens of producing countries before narrowing into a handful of refining hubs, principally in China, and widening again into global manufacturing. Since refining captures far more economic value than mining, where it happens matters as much as where extraction does.
Today, the Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of the G7's Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. In 2023, the United States, the European Union, Angola, the DRC and Zambia signed a memorandum of understanding to modernise and extend the railway to reduce transport costs, facilitate cross-border trade and strengthen regional integration. Yet the project is also intended to reduce Western dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains, placing it at the intersection of great-power competition, colonial infrastructure and green industrial policy, while raising the question of whose development is truly being prioritised.
The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, for example, is explicit that one of its aims is to minimise strategic dependence on China. Although it also commits to supporting local processing capacity in partner countries, that commitment is modest against the scale of investment required: the DRC still exports around 97% of its cobalt in raw or semi-processed form, foregoing the jobs and technology transfer associated with refining while absorbing many of the environmental and social costs of mining. This is a pattern that African states know too well. Raw materials are exported, and higher-value industry is built elsewhere. It would take sustained investment in refining capacity to overcome that pattern, rather than just inherit it.
Yet domestic refining is capital- and energy-intensive. It requires reliable electricity, transport infrastructure and technical expertise that remain underdeveloped in many producer countries. Western development finance institutions have also become more cautious about backing large-scale mining and processing projects given the environmental and social risks involved. Despite ambitions to reduce dependence on China, Western governments have shown limited willingness to finance the refining capacity needed to do so. This leaves China’s established refining ecosystem as the default option for producer states attempting to move up the value chain. Indeed, when Zimbabwe banned raw mineral exports in 2026, the Chinese firm Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt responded fastest, building the continent's first lithium sulfate refining plant.
Framing this purely through dependency, however, risks treating African governments as passive recipients of external investment when, in practice, many are actively negotiating the terms of their own participation. In Zimbabwe’s case, the export ban demonstrated that producer states can use restrictions to encourage local value addition. Similarly, the DRC used the prospect of an alternative Chinese aid-trade-investment package to renegotiate over sixty long-term mining contracts held by Western firms.
Since 2023, fourteen African countries have placed restrictions on raw or semi-processed mineral exports — the beginning of a shared bargaining playbook. However, not every attempt has succeeded. Zambia and the DRC's proposed joint EV battery value chain has stalled over disagreements about where production should be located, illustrating the importance of regional coordination. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the African Union's 2025 Green Minerals Strategy seek to address this by coordinating industrial policy across producer states, allowing neighbouring economies to specialise in different stages of processing and manufacturing rather than requiring each state to develop a complete value chain alone. Tellingly, many African institutions prefer the term ‘green minerals’ to ‘critical minerals’. ‘Critical’ reflects the anxieties of industrialised economies managing their own energy transitions, whereas to producer states these minerals represent an opportunity for industrial development.
Today's geopolitical environment is more transactional than in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, with greater multipolarity and a declining rules-based order. Competition between major powers gives mineral-rich states greater scope to bargain, but also encourages bilateral deals that can undermine regional coordination. Yet bargaining power varies significantly across minerals. The DRC holds 47% of the world's cobalt reserves, making it the clearest case of a near-irreplaceable supply. In contrast, Africa only holds 5% of known global lithium reserves, which limits any single state's bargaining position. Leverage, in other words, depends on both the mineral and the stage of the value chain in question. It is also inherently temporary. Battery technologies will evolve, recycling will expand, and alternatives will become available.
China's near-monopoly over mineral refining is itself proof that control over strategic bottlenecks confers real leverage. As the US, EU and China compete more intensely for secure supply, resource-rich African states occupy a stronger strategic position. Nevertheless, as Stefan Dercon argues, long-term economic transformation depends on political elites reaching a ‘development bargain’ in favour of sustained structural change. Geopolitical leverage therefore only becomes developmental where governments possess both the institutional capacity to negotiate effectively and the political consensus to translate temporary opportunities into long-term industrial strategy. That capacity remains limited in many producer states, with over a hundred separate mineral agreements signed between African governments and external partners, often with poor coordination between them. Leverage without coherent policy and coordination produces better terms on the same extractive deal, rather than genuinely transformative outcomes.
The green transition is neither simply reproducing older patterns of dependency, nor guaranteeing development. Instead, it has opened a narrow window in which mineral-rich African states hold greater strategic importance than at any point in recent decades. Whether African governments can transform this leverage into lasting industrial development before the window closes remains a defining political economy question of the energy transition.
