Africa holds a significant share of the minerals the world needs to move off fossil fuels: lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements, platinum group metals. Yet the continent still captures only a small fraction of the investment and value flowing through the industries those minerals make possible.
In February 2025, African Union heads of state adopted a response to that imbalance: the African Green Minerals Strategy (AGMS). It’s a continental framework for turning Africa from a raw-material shelf into a genuine partner in the industries its own minerals power. And as Mkhululi Ncube of the AU’s African Minerals Development Centre (AMDC) explains on the JET Voices podcast, the strategy starts with a decision most coverage of “critical minerals” skips entirely: what to call them.
Why “green,” not “critical”
“Critical minerals.” “Strategic minerals.” Both terms come from outside Africa. The first was popularized by U.S. defense policy after World War II, used to describe whatever a given industrial power’s own economy or military can’t do without. The problem, Ncube argues, is that criticality was never defined from Africa’s side of the ledger.
Take rare earth elements used in the permanent magnets inside wind turbines and EV motors. They’re critical to the industries that manufacture those magnets, and those industries barely exist on the African continent right now. So calling the minerals “critical” describes someone else’s supply chain, not Africa’s.
That’s the reasoning behind the AU’s choice of “green” instead:
“So for us, we then say they’re green minerals for us. As Africa, they are green to us.”
It’s a small linguistic shift with a large implication. The minerals get framed around what Africa can build with them, not around what other economies need to import.
What the strategy actually says
The AGMS isn’t a slogan. It’s a formally adopted policy document, built on the foundation of the Africa Mining Vision (2009), the continental framework for turning mineral wealth into broad-based development rather than raw exports. Its stated vision is an Africa that uses green mineral value chains to drive equitable, resource-based industrialization and electrification, not just extraction.
The strategy is organized around four pillars. (See the African Green Minerals Observatory’s explainer for the full breakdown.)
1. Advancing Mineral Development. Before anything else, Africa needs to know what it actually has in the ground. That means investing in geological surveys, closing infrastructure gaps, and building a continent-wide classification system called AMRICH/PARC, so mineral data from different countries can be compared and financed on the same terms. It’s a detail Ncube highlights specifically on the podcast.
2. Developing Human and Technological Capabilities. Building the skills base needed to do more than dig and ship: engineers, geoscientists, technicians. This includes STEM education partnerships and innovation hubs like the Centre of Excellence for Batteries.
3. Building Strategic Value Chains. Using the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to build regional processing and manufacturing capacity, so ore turns into batteries and vehicles on the continent instead of leaving on a container ship.
4. Promoting Prudent Mineral Stewardship. Making sure the environmental and social costs of mining don’t fall disproportionately on the communities sitting on top of the minerals.
The starting point nobody can skip
Ask Ncube where the strategy actually begins, and the answer isn’t financing or factories. It’s information.
“Accepting as a collective that we have the minerals. Accepting as a collective that we need to know how much of these minerals we have.”
That’s a bigger ask than it sounds. Mineral deposits don’t respect national borders, so exploration data from Zimbabwe needs to line up with data from Zambia, from Uganda, from South Africa. That kind of coordination has historically been rare on the continent. Without it, Ncube argues, everything downstream (financing, processing, manufacturing) is built on guesswork.
What’s actually on the table
Beneath the pillars, the AGMS proposes some concrete mechanisms: a common external tariff on unprocessed mineral exports and imported value-chain products, a dedicated Green Mineral Value Chain Investment Fund to bring down the cost of capital, and requirements for mining investors to put a share of payroll and revenue into local STEM skills and research. There’s also targeted protection for lower-income member states building these industries from scratch.
None of it is guaranteed to work. Coordinating 55 countries around shared tariffs, shared data, and shared infrastructure is exactly the kind of regional cooperation that’s historically been hardest to pull off in practice. But the strategy is at least explicit about where the leverage points are, starting with the one thing nobody can shortcut: knowing what you have before you decide what to do with it.
Hear the full conversation
Statistics and strategy documents explain the what. On JET Voices, Mkhululi Ncube explains the why: the periodic table, a childhood on a cattle farm, and why Africa’s 2009 mining vision was once dismissed as “resource nationalism” by the same voices now praising it.
🎧 Listen to “Africa’s Green Mineral” with Mkhululi Ncube →
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Further reading
“Can ASM Lead the Africa Mining Vision?” – Mkhululi Ncube, for IIED
Mkhululi Ncube – speaker profile, Mining Indaba
“How We’re Coordinating Implementation of Africa Mining Vision” – interview, African Newspage
