- Africa’s Critical-Minerals Pipeline Jumps 36.00% to 658 Projects, But Production Lags — EY
Africa’s critical-minerals pipeline has expanded sharply to 658 projects, up from 483 in the first quarter of 2025, but the increase is being driven far more by exploration and development than by actual production.
The latest Critical Minerals: Pivotal Outlook, developed by Africa Business+ in partnership with EY, shows a 36.00% increase in listed projects across eight strategic minerals.
The gap between the number of projects being discovered and those reaching production is emerging as the central constraint on Africa’s ability to translate mineral potential into near-term global supply.
The contrast is stark. Exploration projects increased 82.00%, from 109 to 198, while development-stage projects rose 70.00%, from 76 to 129, yet producing projects increased by only 11.00%, from 259 to 288.
Gaël Tanguy, Senior Consultant for Infrastructure Advisory at EY, said, “The key element of this update is the gap between exploration up 82% and a number of producing projects rising by only 11%.”
That imbalance suggests Africa is building a much larger upstream pipeline without yet converting it into corresponding volumes of cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese and other minerals reaching world markets.
Tanguy said the divergence “reveals the full tension in the sector: Africa is preparing tomorrow’s supply, supported by global demand, without being able to respond at the same pace just yet.”
For investors and governments, the implication is that identifying mineral deposits is increasingly less of a constraint than financing, permitting, constructing and operating them.
The platform tracks eight minerals central to energy and industrial value chains: bauxite, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel and platinum. It also maps processing, refining and smelting facilities linked to those projects, allowing users to compare assets by location, stage of maturity, ownership, investor origin, resources, production volumes and capital invested.
The dataset is updated twice a year to identify structural changes before they become established trends.
Lithium is at the centre of the latest expansion. Of the 32 projects added since the first quarter of 2026, 27 involve lithium, spread across 13 countries and led by Zimbabwe and Nigeria, with Australian groups involved in about one-third and Canadian groups in roughly one-quarter.
But 25 of those 27 projects remain at exploration stage, meaning the current lithium rush represents intensified prospecting rather than an imminent increase in commercially available supply.
That dynamic reflects the long lead times that continue to define mining investment. The report says projects upstream in the cycle are not expected to supply the market before the next decade, even as operators position themselves for a longer-term increase in demand.
The momentum has also survived the decline in battery-metal prices observed in 2024 and 2025, suggesting companies are taking positions based on long-cycle strategic expectations rather than short-term commodity prices alone.
State participation is also becoming a more important feature of the African mining landscape. The report says Congolese public entities now control 48.00% of projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, up from 39.00% in February 2025, while Mali’s 2023 mining code allows the state to take up to 35.00% equity in projects and Burkina Faso permits stakes of up to 15.00%.
The trend gives governments greater influence over mineral development but simultaneously increases their exposure to financing, execution and commodity-market risks.
Critical minerals are also becoming more strategically important beyond batteries and the energy transition. Five of the eight minerals tracked by the platform appear among 12 raw materials identified by NATO in December 2024 as critical to defence supply chains, covering 321 African projects, or 49.00% of the total.
That overlap strengthens Africa’s geopolitical relevance because minerals such as cobalt and platinum are increasingly tied not only to clean-energy technologies but also to defence electronics and advanced industrial systems.
The geopolitical shift could give African governments greater bargaining power, but it also raises the stakes around ownership, processing and long-term supply agreements. Where access to raw materials becomes a matter of strategic security, negotiations increasingly take place between governments rather than purely between mining companies and commodity buyers.
That could strengthen Africa’s position, but only if producing countries can convert geological resources into projects that are commercially viable and operationally dependable.
Local processing is another area where the map is changing. The database identifies 101 processing facilities, concentrated mainly in South Africa, the DRC and Zambia, with government policies increasingly pushing companies towards beneficiation and domestic value addition.
China is active in 123 projects and involved in 54.00% of Congolese projects, deploying what the report describes as an integrated strategy stretching from mines through transport infrastructure to refineries.
The economic opportunity for African countries lies in ensuring that mineral development generates more than royalties and raw-material exports. Processing, refining, engineering services, logistics and manufacturing can retain more value domestically while building technical capability and employment around the extractive sector.
The challenge is that beneficiation requires reliable electricity, infrastructure, skills, financing and competitive operating conditions, meaning policy ambitions alone will not guarantee internationally viable processing industries.
In the near term, much of the additional mineral supply may come not from new discoveries but from extending existing mines.
The report says an average of 15 to 17 years can separate discovery from first production, while expanding an operating mine can reduce capital expenditure by 30.00% to 50.00% and remove much of the geological and regulatory uncertainty associated with greenfield development. The platform currently identifies 44 expansion projects, of which 22 are already under way.
That makes mine extensions a strategically important bridge between today’s demand and tomorrow’s new supply. Governments and investors may therefore find quicker returns in expanding existing infrastructure while continuing to finance longer-term exploration and development pipelines. It also means that countries with established mines, processing facilities and regulatory frameworks could hold an advantage over jurisdictions where large resources remain undeveloped.
Julien Wagner, Director of Special Content at Jeune Afrique Media Group, said the expanded database allows structural shifts to be identified much earlier.
“From the lithium rush to the emergence of numerous processing plants close to mines, every update of Critical Minerals: Pivotal Outlook is an opportunity to observe the reshaping of Africa’s mining sector in the service of the global energy transition,” he said.
The broader picture, however, remains one in which Africa’s project pipeline is expanding much faster than its producing capacity.
Africa’s critical-minerals challenge is therefore moving beyond discovery. States are becoming larger shareholders, lithium exploration is accelerating, defence demand is widening the strategic market, local processing is expanding and operating mines are being pushed to produce more while new projects remain years from completion.
As the report concludes, “The challenge is no longer to identify deposits: it is to finance, build and operate those that have now been mapped.”
