Resource-rich African nations risk missing out on the investment needed to extract and refine their mineral wealth into high-value products for the clean energy transition because they lack accurate information on what they have, experts are warning.
African countries have attracted huge interest as the world scrambles to access theminerals and metals needed for the energy transition and digital and military technologies, with investors from the US, China, the United Arab Emirates and Europe jostling to secure access to the continent’s resources.
But any knowledge of Africa’s mineral wealth is, at best, an estimate based on century-old-mapping and haphazard geological data, policy experts and investors told Climate Home News.
The United Nations says Africa is home to 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, including cobalt, copper, lithium and manganese, which are needed to manufacture batteries and other clean energy technologies.
But experts like Bright Simons, who tracks natural resource spending in Africa for the Ghana-based IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, said the 30% number is not backed by any “empirical, evidence-based assessment” of the continent’s mineral wealth. While some analysts like Simons think the figure could be an overestimate, others argue it is likely an underestimate of the continent’s mineral reserves.
Filling “mind-boggling” gaps in mining data will make it easier to track the environmental impact of surging global appetite for critical minerals, experts say
Colombia’s proposal for the UNEA to set up an expert group to identify options for governing mineral supply chains was rejected by a broad group of states
Mining firms say extracting minerals from tailings is a sustainable way to boost global supplies, but local communities want to see benefits this time around
Up-to-date and accurate data is critical for governments to negotiate better deals with prospecting mining companies and to help drive investment in mineral extraction and processing facilities that can add value to the continent’s resources.
But the lack of good mapping has negatively impacted the continent’s efforts to capture the economic benefits of booming mineral demand and to create jobs by extracting and processing raw materials into higher-value products before export, experts said.
Colonial maps
Under-exploration and scant information about Africa’s resources have made it challenging for states to attract investment and develop their resources, said Pritish Behuria, a political economist at the Global Development Institute at the UK’s University of Manchester.
“In many cases, former colonial powers retain more current knowledge of the kinds of mineral deposits that exist in African countries – and often, this has proven difficult to access for African governments,” he told Climate Home News.
Thabit Jacob, a researcher of extractive and energy resources at Roskilde University in Denmark, said many African countries “still rely on colonial maps”.
“There’s a growing realisation that Africa must know its true value in mineral richness and investment in geological mapping is crucial,” he added.
Mapping inequality
However, mapping investment is falling short. Africa’s share of global exploration investment has fallen in the last two decades, data shows.
In 2024 alone, both Canada and Australia received significantly more investment in geological mapping than the whole of Africa, even though the continent’s landmass is three times the size of the two countries combined, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Even in South Africa, a major mining destination, only 12% of the country has been mapped at a detailed level “which compares poorly with other popular mining destinations such as Canada and Australia where there is near complete coverage at similar scales”, explained Tania Marshall, of the Geological Society of South Africa.
As a result, international investors prioritising project development have come to dominate the continent’s mining sector, crowding out state-sponsored initiatives with stronger incentives to invest in data-gathering, researchers have found.
Workers during a break at the Prospect Lithium mine and processing plant in Goromonzi, Zimbabwe (Photo: REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo)
Digging blind
Orina Chang, an investor leading geological mapping across Somaliland, which has reserves of copper and zinc ore, said she was surprised to find out that even countries attracting huge interest from institutional miners, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), do not have systematic up-to-date mapping.
Instead, mining firms rely on artisanal mining and surface signs, like exposed ores on the ground – and crossing their fingers, she told Climate Home News.
The mapping deficit means there is little certainty on the size and quality of mineral deposits and provides few incentives for miners to invest in processing plants, Chang explained.
“Without mapping, everyone is blindly digging and you just get people who are not interested in really investing in your country,” she said. “With mapping, you’re able to attract much better players and build plants, create jobs, drive economic growth, help the GDP.”
The rise of AI-driven exploration tools
Today, AI-driven mapping tools have created new opportunities to obtain high-precision information with less on-the-ground investment. Geophysical data and satellite imagery are fed into a model that creates a geological map which can help point to high-potential deposits.
Last year, California-based KoBold Metals, which is backed by US billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, discovered a massive copper deposit in Zambia using AI-driven exploration. In July, the firm signed an agreement with the DRC to lead critical mineral exploration there.
But the technology is expensive and not widely available to governments.
Instead, in its 2024 Green Minerals Strategy, the African Union called for some of the revenues from mineral rents to be reinvested into mapping using low-cost techniques such as satellite imagery and drones, which are less precise.
Dozens of families are threatening to sue China’s Sino-Metals over a devastating spill of toxic mining waste that caused one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters
The West African nation wants to supply refined lithium to the EV battery industry to diversify its economy away from oil – but early processing efforts are facing challenges
A major revision to the EU’s law on corporate due diligence removes a requirement for large companies to publish plans to align their business model with global climate goals
The case for co-operation
For Gerald Arhin, a research fellow at University College London, greater regional collaboration and pooling resources could also help reduce the costs of mapping for individual governments. Last year, for example, South Africa signed an agreement with South Sudan to co-operate on mineral exploration.
“The sharing of data, industrial intelligence and technical expertise across borders could be transformative for African countries, as well as for developing countries in other regions,” Clovis Freire, who heads the Extractive Commodities Section at UN Trade and Development (Unctad), told Climate Home News.
Mapping, however, is only one element of a complicated equation when it comes to developing minerals for the energy transition, said Eszter Szedlacsek, who researches climate justice in the context of the green transition at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
“In the race for Africa’s critical minerals, deals hinge only partly on where resources are found, and more on geopolitics, investment conditions and longstanding trade ties,” she said.
African countries at COP30 say a lack of climate finance to speed the transition to renewable energy means they should be given more leeway to use their fossil fuel resources to benefit their people.
As support grows at the climate talks in Belém for a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, championed by Brazil’s president and environment minister, leaders and officials from Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique have said African nations should be allowed to keep using their fossil fuel resources to develop their economies.
Africa receives less than 2% of international clean energy investment, and badly needs funding to help increase access to power supplies, which some 600 million people still lack, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Carlos Lopes, COP30’s special envoy for Africa, told Climate Home News that while the priority is still for Africa to transition as quickly as possible to renewables, “if the funding is not coming, Africans have to be pragmatic and will have to use any possibilities to enhance their development”.
“Africans are basically trapped not because of infrastructure but because of the financing schemes that are not allowing them to move as fast as they should wish for the new form of economy,” Lopes said, adding that too much global finance was going into fossil fuels rather than renewables.
At the UN climate summit, African negotiators are seeking more “debt-free” financing that would allow them to implement climate solutions – from adaptation to just transition
Officials say the country needs time and money to ramp up renewables, but critics say betting on gas is a risky strategy that could prolong the “oil curse”
The country’s latest climate plan slashes its emissions-cutting target, a move the government says is realistic given Angola’s economic challenges and lack of international support
The IEA’s “Financing Electricity Access in Africa” 2025 report found that less than $2.5 billion was committed for new electricity access connections in sub-Saharan Africa in 2023. Meanwhile, financing has been concentrated in a small number of countries including Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, and has been skewed towards urban areas.
African leaders call for “room” for fossil fuels
Several African countries have lowered ambition for cutting emissions in their latest national climate plans (known as NDCs), citing a lack of funding that has hampered climate action, a message that was echoed during the leaders’ summit in Belém last week.
Ghanaian minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah said “conversations [on phasing out] must be approached with strategic care and profound understanding”.
“To deny Africa the strategic use of these [natural] resources is to deny our right to develop, to light our homes and to power industries,” Buah, Ghana’s lands minister and acting environment minister, told the leaders’ summit.
Mozambique President Daniel Chapo, meanwhile, supported the idea of a just transition, but one that gives Africa the “economic and political room” to use its natural resources to benefit its people.
A boy follows a woman carrying a sack on her head as they walk towards a burning gas flaring furnace at a flow station in Ughelli, Delta State., Nigeria September 17, 2020. Picture taken September 17, 2020. REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde
A boy follows a woman carrying a sack on her head as they walk towards a burning gas flaring furnace at a flow station in Ughelli, Delta State., Nigeria September 17, 2020. Picture taken September 17, 2020. REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde
Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, had already made clear in its NDC that it planned to boost the use of natural gas as a so-called transition fuel.
Vice President Kashim Shettima told the leaders’ meeting that Nigeria would use natural gas “to stabilise power and drive industrial growth” while promoting clean energy by expanding solar and off-grid solutions for rural electrification.
A just transition made for Africa
The world agreed for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” two years ago at COP28 in Dubai, but a plan to implement that pledge at the global level has yet to be sketched out.
If countries decide to work on one, it is likely that poor countries will ask for rich nations to set earlier deadlines to reduce their production and use of coal, oil and gas.
Nafi Quarshie, Africa director for the non-profit Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), said any fossil fuel phase-out targets in a roadmap must be “concrete and time-bound”, and reflect different realities.
“Africa cannot be talking about phase-out when it has not phased in,” she told a press conference on Wednesday. “Africa’s pathway cannot mirror Europe’s or America’s. The transition in Africa must prioritise energy access, job creation, diversification and development, not just emissions reduction targets.”
Until the COP process delivers on its financial promises to Africa, the continent cannot be asked to abandon the fossil fuels that currently provide a huge chunk of government revenues in some economies “without credible, accessible, or predictable financial support to replace them,” Quarshie added.
Tanzania, a fossil gas producer that led African nations at COP30, urged African ministers to position themselves against transitioning away from fossil fuels ahead of critical negotiations in the final week of the summit, according to a document seen by Climate Home News.
The recommendation was part of a four-page presentation dated November 15 – the halfway point of COP30 – and delivered by Tanzania’s lead negotiator during a briefing on the just transition work programme as calls for the inclusion of a fossil fuel roadmap in the conference’s main outcome were gathering speed.
The powerpoint advised African countries to maintain a position against transitioning away from fossil fuels, while also ensuring that a call for universal energy access was included in the text.
Separately, Tanzania’s Richard Muyungi, chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), told Climate Home News on November 14 that the group had yet to coordinate their views on a potential fossil fuel transition roadmap, but would do so if developments at COP30 required it. He added that Africa should not be forced or pushed towards a trajectory that threatens to undermine its development agenda.
Nonetheless, two African countries publicly stated during COP30 that they supported a transition roadmap, suggesting that they did not agree with the approach proposed by the African group. A formal group position was not declared openly during the summit.
Tanzania’s Richard Muyungi, AGN chair, and COP30 President André Correa do Lago speaking during a COP30 plenary. Photo: UN Climate Change – Kiara Worth
Tanzania’s Richard Muyungi, AGN chair, and COP30 President André Correa do Lago speaking during a COP30 plenary. Photo: UN Climate Change – Kiara Worth
“Pathetic” to tell Africa to transition
Explicit references to phasing out fossil fuels were axed from the final “Global Mutirão” decision in the Belém “political package”, following strong pushback from oil and gas-producing nations led by Gulf states. But questions remained over the role of African countries, with The Guardian suggesting that AGN Chair Muyungi told a closed-door meeting that the continent’s 54 countries aligned with Arab Group nations on the issue.
Muyungi did not confirm this alignment publicly, telling Climate Home News that the AGN had not been consulted by the COP30 presidency on fossil fuels. He added that, as many African nations have only just started tapping their oil and gas reserves, “how do you tell them to transition away when they have just discovered it [fossil fuel]?”
The AGN chair stressed that what Africa needs is energy access for the over 600 million people who currently lack electricity and 900 million others without clean cooking. He added that it would “really be pathetic” if Africa were told by other countries to transition away from fossil fuels. “Ours is a transition away from wood and charcoal to electricity,” he said.
Many local people are disappointed by efforts to repair the devastation left by foreign oil firms even as the Nigerian government plans to restart drilling
Governments failed to agree on a roadmap to transition away from coal, oil and gas at COP30, but the COP31 Co-President says fight will continue
Tanzania boasts vast gas reserves, some of which are expected to be auctioned off in a long-awaited new licensing round, and relies on the fossil fuel for over two-thirds of its electricity. Tanzania is also involved in the controversial 1,443-kilometre East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), which aims to carry crude oil extracted from fields under development near Uganda’s Lake Albert to the Tanga port in Tanzania for export to international markets.
Muyungi said the continent could get cheap electricity from gas and “nobody can tell us to transition away from gas because this is our survival now”.
“Our economy will not move if somebody tells us to move away from gas because it is part of the fossil fuels – we cannot accept [that],” he told Climate Home News.
African nations split over fossil fuel roadmap
Before negotiations kicked off in Belém, some African leaders called for careful consideration of any attempt to transition away from fossil fuels. Ghana’s environment minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah said that “to deny Africa the strategic use of these [natural] resources is to deny our right to develop, to light our homes and to power industries”.
Ghana will become chair of the African Group of Negotiators for the next two years, starting in January.
As the idea of a fossil fuel transition roadmap unexpectedly became a priority for the COP30 talks following strong calls by Brazil’s president and environment minister, the divergent positions of African nations started to surface, making it hard for them to form a common stance.
Kenya and Sierra Leone, which overwhelmingly rely on clean energy sources, publicly supported the roadmap, joining a group of more than 80 countries to call for its inclusion in the final Mutirao decision.
Sierra Leone’s Environment Minister Jiwoh Abdulai at COP30. Photo: UN Climate Change – Kiara Worth
Sierra Leone’s Environment Minister Jiwoh Abdulai at COP30. Photo: UN Climate Change – Kiara Worth
Speaking at a press conference two days before the close of COP30, Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s minister of environment and climate change, said moving away from fossil fuels is not just a climate issue but an economic issue.
“We need to treat this with urgency, moving away from fossil fuels that are driving the increase in temperature,” he said, adding that “it has to be just and equitable especially for countries in Africa”.
Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, took a more critical stance, saying it would not support any process that would lead to its “sudden economic contraction and heightened social instability”. In a speech during the closing plenary, a Nigerian government official said “a successful transition cannot be imposed” but should be a deliberate process that is nationally determined and supported by international cooperation.
Missed opportunity for Africa
While the final Mutirão decision did not reference fossil fuel transition roadmaps in any form, the Brazilian presidency promised to create a voluntary one outside of the UN climate process over the next year. The process is expected to gain support from other countries such as Colombia, which will host the first conference on the issue in April.
“We know some of you had greater ambition for some of the issues at hand,” COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago told the COP30 closing plenary. “I will try not to disappoint you.”
Experts said that, by not coming out in support of the fossil fuel roadmap, most African countries missed an opportunity to bring their energy access and finance demands into the centre of the talks.
Tengi George-Ikoli, Nigeria manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), said that rather than seeing it as a risk, Africa could have leveraged the opportunity to shape how the transition unfolds and ensure it does not happen in a way “that could cause more economic instability”, but is made into “a global pathway that is equitable, inclusive and just”.
But the lack of collaboration around a roadmap meant that Africa lost a chance “for that collective voice” to influence a pathway that considers energy access needs, market volatility and the vulnerability of oil-dependent economies, she said.
Finance at the centre
The scepticism around the roadmap resulted from a lack of clarity, one observer who asked for anonymity told Climate Home News. He said African nations saw the roadmap as a Brazilian initiative that they first came across in Belém, so “there was limited understanding of what this roadmap was about”.
NRGI’s George-Ikoli said that, while it was not clear what the roadmap would entail, African countries became more fixated on that instead of seeing its potential. “We might have gone too far into thinking that this roadmap may not be good for us and interpreting it to mean a number of things, not recognising that there’s an opportunity we can leverage now if we’re keen at the start and demand strongly.”
Financial and technological support must be at the centre of the mission, Sierra Leonean minister Abdulai said. He noted that Africa still needs to grow its economies but also wants to be part of the climate solution because “to us, climate action and economic growth are not mutually exclusive”.
The summit, co-hosted with the Netherlands, aims to help countries work out a fair path to stop using planet-heating oil, gas and coal – a sticking point at the COP30 talks in Brazil
The anonymous observer echoed the same, saying “any roadmap without finance will just remain a roadmap to nowhere”, adding that African countries also did not want to commit to something that they are not going to be able to afford to implement.
Seble Samuel, head of Africa campaigns and advocacy at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said any roadmap needs to have clear accountability measures so that “it is not a smokescreen for continued failures on the means of implementation [finance]”. “That ultimately gaslights the Global South, especially those facing the biggest barriers to transition – like African nations,” she added.
George-Ikoli said African nations “can still leverage” the COP30 presidency roadmap to define, on their own terms, what a just transition must look like.
The coming year, she added, must be used to build a collective African position so the continent arrives at the next COP prepared and ready “to place its issues heightened on the agenda”.
This story was updated after publication to add that Ghana will become AGN chair for 2026-2027.
Government once seen as progressive on migration says aid cuts to blame for excluding countries ‘not experiencing war’
The Ugandan government has stopped granting asylum and refugee status to people from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, citing severe funding shortfalls for the significant policy shift.
Hillary Onek, Uganda’s minister for refugees, announced that the government would no longer grant the status to new arrivals from countries “not experiencing war”.
Global Witness says plan to upgrade railway line to Angola puts up to 1,200 buildings at risk of demolition
Up to 6,500 people are at risk of being displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project funded by the EU and the US, amid a global race to secure supplies of copper, cobalt and other “critical minerals”, according to a report by campaign group Global Witness.
The project, labelled the Lobito Corridor, aims to upgrade the colonial-era Benguela railway from the DRC to Lobito on Angola’s coast and improve port infrastructure, as well as building a railway line to Zambia and supporting agriculture and solar power installations along the route. Angola has said it needs $4.5bn (£3.4bn) for its stretch of the line.
Trump envoy fails to secure deal as Norway prepares to host talks on how to restore civilian government in Sudan
The US is considering a much broader range of sanctions on the belligerents in the war in Sudan, in a tacit acknowledgment of the inability of the US envoy Massad Boulos to persuade the parties to accept a ceasefire.
Last week Donald Trump announced that work had begun to end the war after a personal request for his direct intervention from the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
