The Fresh Scramble for Africa’s Minerals: Securing Supply Chains in a Great Power Competition

The global race for technological supremacy now runs on cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and coltan – the minerals that make possible everything from electric vehicle batteries to semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Rare earth elements, a group of 17 metals essential to electronics and defense technologies, and coltan, the ore used to produce tantalum for smartphones and aerospace components, have become the building blocks of twenty-first-century power. Whoever controls their supply controls the infrastructure of our digital age.

China understood this decades ago and built a near monopoly, commanding around 70 percent of global rare earth mining and roughly 90 percent of the processing capacity that turns raw ore into usable material. The IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 highlights the increasing demand for these minerals, driven largely by energy applications like electric vehicles and battery storage.

Africa: The Foundational Continent

The US and its allies are now scrambling to catch up. But what rarely features in coverage of this great power competition is that the minerals at the centre of it are overwhelmingly located in African soil.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, alongside vast deposits of coltan and copper. The US State Department recognizes the DRC’s critical role in the supply of these minerals. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique possess significant reserves of graphite, lithium and nickel.

Africa is not peripheral to the technology economy. It is foundational to it. Yet most African producers remain confined to the lowest-value end of the supply chain, exporting raw ore whereas refining, manufacturing and profit accumulation take place elsewhere.

The 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial and New Partnerships

It was against this backdrop that the US hosted its first Critical Minerals Ministerial on February 4, 2026. More than fifty countries gathered at the State Department to announce a preferential trading bloc – effectively a club offering favourable trade terms among its members – alongside coordinated price floors designed to stabilise mineral markets. A new partnership, FORGE, was unveiled, as well as Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic stockpile intended to shield US industry from supply disruptions.

Vice President Vance spoke of ending dependence on foreign suppliers. Secretary of State Rubio warned that supply chains had been “weaponised”. Hundreds of billions of dollars in mining investment were promised.

From Conflict to Contracts: The Washington Accords

The visible story was one of Western coordination to counter China’s dominance. The less visible story – and the one more consequential for Africa – begins earlier.

In February 2025, as M23 rebels operating in eastern Congo – widely reported to be backed by Rwanda – occupied the cities of Goma and Bukavu, displacing millions, President Félix Tshisekedi wrote to President Donald Trump offering US access to the DRC’s critical minerals in exchange for security assistance. The Washington Accords followed in June 2025, brokering peace between the DRC and Rwanda under US mediation and paving the way for bilateral strategic partnership agreements that granted American companies preferential access to Congolese minerals.

By December 2025, the arrangement was formalised at a signing ceremony where Trump declared that “everybody’s going to make a lot of money.” The day before this year’s ministerial, the US-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium signed a memorandum of understanding – a preliminary commercial agreement – with Glencore to acquire a 40 percent stake in Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company, two of the DRC’s largest copper and cobalt operations, in a $9 billion transaction. The consortium gained the right to direct sales to nominated buyers. Glencore retained operational control. US strategic interests secured the output.

Implications for Africa

The immediate implications are stark. A country negotiating under acute military pressure traded access to its most valuable geological assets for a peace that remains fragile. Fighting continues in eastern Congo.

The DRC entered these arrangements from profound vulnerability, and the imbalance in bargaining power shaped the outcome.

The deeper implications are structural. The architecture Washington is building is not designed to transform producing countries into industrial economies. It is designed to reroute the flow of raw materials away from Chinese processing plants and toward Western ones.

Coordinated price floors may protect mining investors from market volatility, including price suppression by dominant buyers. They do not guarantee that producing countries will capture greater fiscal rents – the government revenues derived from natural resources. Nor do the bilateral agreements signed at speed appear to expand policy space for African governments to impose export levies, require local processing (often referred to as beneficiation), or mandate local content rules that prioritise domestic labour and suppliers. Historically, such tools have been central to moving resource-rich economies up the value chain.

What remains largely invisible in this emerging minerals regime are the inequalities it may entrench.