Afrika Kıtası, madenlerin ve minerallerin daha geniş iş ekosistemleri oluşturmaya başladığı yerdir
Africa’s Minerals Are Not the Prize. The Value Chain Is.
Africa’s minerals challenge has been misread for decades. The constraint is not resources, ambition, or global demand. It is the absence of control over the value chain that turns geology into business, jobs, revenue, and geopolitical leverage.
The evidence is now consistent across institutions and disciplines. World Bank, AfDB, UNDP and academic work all point to the same conclusion: value is created and captured in midstream systems, not at the mine face. Aggregation, processing, logistics, traceability, and offtake determine outcomes. Extraction is the entry point, not the engine.
Where minerals move straight from pit to port, the result is predictable: thin margins, volatile revenues, weak domestic industries, and dependence on external price-makers. Where countries intervene deliberately at the midstream level by formalising artisanal supply, building processing hubs, aligning power and transport infrastructure, and anchoring output to compliant buyers, the economics shift. Productivity improves. Revenues stabilise. Investment becomes repeatable rather than speculative.
This is not a social agenda. It is an industrial and commercial strategy. Formalising artisanal mining converts informal throughput into bankable supply. Processing capacity retains margin and builds skills. Logistics determines whether mining scales into an economy or remains an enclave.
Midstream is also where minerals begin to generate broader business ecosystems. Power demand, transport services, finance, engineering, equipment leasing, compliance technology, and workforce development all emerge around predictable processing and export systems. These are the businesses that stay local, compound over time, and anchor long-term growth.
Geopolitically, the same logic applies. Supply chains reward reliability, not abundance. Countries that can deliver consistent, traceable, standards-compliant material at scale become indispensable partners. Those that cannot remain price takers, regardless of what sits underground.
Africa does not need another call to “move up the value chain.” It needs to build the systems that make value chains work. Midstream is where minerals become markets, markets become industries, and industries become leverage.
(Tim Beighton, Global Strategy)
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