By Issah Mohammed, GNA
Accra, Aug. 24, GNA – Africa must strengthen institutions and regional bargaining power to avoid repeating the oil-era mistakes in developing its critical mineral resources, experts say.
They said growing global demand for critical minerals presented the continent with an opportunity to industrialise, create jobs and finance development, provided the resources were not treated like traditional commodities and exported without value addition.
Speaking at the 2026 Anglophone Africa Extractive Industries Knowledge Hub (AFREIKH) Summer School in Accra, Mr Benjamin Boakye, Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), said Africa had already missed opportunities to translate its oil wealth into broad-based development.
“Across the continent, oil has generated enormous expectation, but too often those expectations are not translated into development that citizens welcome,” he said.
Mr Boakye said revenues had been lost, institutions weakened and economic opportunities missed, while mining in several countries had become associated with environmental destruction, weak governance and social disruption.
He warned that the emerging critical-minerals boom could become another missed opportunity unless African countries changed how they managed their natural resources.
Mr Boakye said the continent needed to use critical minerals to industrialise, create jobs and build local industries rather than simply extracting and exporting raw materials.
He also urged African countries to use mineral revenues to invest in education, healthcare, infrastructure and productive sectors while protecting communities and the environment.
Ms Nafi Quarshie, Africa Director of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), similarly cautioned that the global energy transition could reproduce Africa’s traditional extractive model under a new “green” label.
She said Africa was rich in the minerals required for the energy transition but remained energy poor, capital constrained and insufficiently industrialised.
“Green transition is not automatically a just transition,” she said, warning that billions of dollars could flow into critical minerals without creating competitive African industries, skills or businesses.
Ms Quarshie said Africa’s challenge was therefore not simply to extract different minerals but to produce different development outcomes.
She called for stronger institutions, transparent and accountable decision-making, better contracts, responsible revenue management and meaningful community participation.
Ms Quarshie also urged African countries to strengthen regional cooperation to capture more value from their mineral resources, arguing that countries should become more strategic about where they processed, manufactured, innovated and developed regional markets.
“When our neighbouring countries compete against one another, the giving away the value we are trying to capture,” she said, “this is why African cooperation and strong bargaining power matter.”
Ms Magdalena Wüst, Deputy Head of Cooperation at the Embassy of Switzerland, said the energy and extractive sectors remained critical to Africa’s growth but continued to face challenges including weak governance, limited value addition, revenue leakages and unequal benefit sharing.
She said Africa must move beyond being a resource supplier to capturing greater value from its natural wealth as global energy systems evolved and demand for critical minerals rose.
The Summer School, organised by ACEP under the AFREIKH initiative with support from NRGI and other partners, brings together civil society actors, policymakers and media practitioners from across Anglophone Africa to strengthen knowledge and capacity in extractive-sector governance.
The warnings come amid growing calls across Africa for the continent to shift from exporting raw minerals towards processing, regional value chains and industrialisation.
The African Development Bank said in July that Africa held about 30 per cent of the world’s critical mineral deposits but continued to capture only a negligible share of the economic value because much of the continent’s minerals were exported unprocessed.
The experts urged the next generation of African policymakers, researchers, journalists and industry leaders to scrutinise mining agreements and major investments by considering who captures the value, who carries the risks and what capabilities and economic benefits remain in Africa after the resources are extracted.
GNA
Edited by Kenneth Sackey
24 Aug. 2026
Reporter: Issah Mohammed