Two Perspectives, One Question: How Can Africa Keep More of Its Mineral Wealth?

By Danilo Desiderio

Copper glints on trading floors in London and Shanghai, but the value it creates rarely lingers in the countries where it was pulled from the ground. That imbalance sits at the heart of a debate now playing out across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and the wider African mining sector: how can resource-rich nations capture more of the wealth their minerals generate, rather than simply exporting rock and hoping the rest of the world sends money back?

A recent Africanews discussion on the DR Congo’s restrictions on copper and cobalt exports put this question squarely on the table. The logic behind such restrictions is intuitive enough: keep more raw material at home, force processing to happen domestically, and watch value – and jobs – follow. But the DR Congo’s chronic energy shortages expose the flaw in that logic. Smelting copper and refining cobalt are extraordinarily energy-intensive processes. A country cannot legislate its way into an industrial capability it does not yet have the power grid, the skilled workforce, or the infrastructure to support. Ambition, in other words, is not the same as capacity.

Beyond the Border: A Regional Answer to a Continental Problem

This is the starting point for a broader argument I made in a recent essay for Modern Diplomacy, “From Asia to Africa: Lessons on How to Build Regional Mineral Value Chains.” The essay poses a different question entirely: what if the goal isn’t for each African country to build a self-contained mineral value chain within its own borders, but to link the capabilities that already exist – or are emerging – across the continent?

Consider the pieces on the board. One country holds the mineral deposits. Its neighbor has abundant hydropower or renewable energy capacity. A third has invested in refining and processing infrastructure. Another offers logistics networks, ports, or the beginnings of manufacturing expertise. Individually, none of these countries has the full picture. Collectively, they do.

This is precisely the model that helped power Asia’s manufacturing rise. No single Asian economy built an entire semiconductor or electronics supply chain in isolation. Instead, countries specialized according to their comparative strengths and then stitched those strengths together into regional production networks that could compete globally. Africa, with the African Continental Free Trade Area already providing a policy scaffold for cross-border trade, has an opportunity to pursue the same logic with its mineral wealth.

Why Export Bans Miss the Point

There is a real temptation, especially for governments under political pressure to show quick wins, to reach for blunt tools like export restrictions or local-content mandates. These measures can look decisive. But industrial capability is not summoned by decree – it is built, deliberately and often slowly, through investment in energy infrastructure, skills, technology transfer, and regional logistics. Forcing value addition before the underlying capacity exists risks the opposite of the intended effect: stalled projects, deterred investment, and minerals that simply find another route to market.

The smarter path is to identify what each country can competitively do today, invest in deepening that capability, and then connect it to what other countries in the region can do. Regional integration and industrial policy are not competing strategies here – they are two halves of the same solution. One without the other leaves either a fragmented market of countries with big ambitions and no scale, or an open trading zone with nothing distinctive to trade.

From Export Story to Production Ecosystem

Get this right, and Africa’s mineral wealth stops being simply a raw materials export story, repeated on a loop for decades, and starts becoming the foundation of something more durable: an integrated African production ecosystem, capable of capturing far more value from the resources beneath its own soil.

The copper and cobalt will keep moving regardless of what policy Kinshasa or any single capital adopts. The real question is whether Africa builds the regional connections needed to capture value along the way – or watches it pass through, once again, on its way somewhere else.

Danilo Desiderio serves as the CEO of Desiderio Consultants Ltd in Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in African customs, trade, and transport policies and is a senior associate to the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI).