Can South Africa’s G20 Moment Consolidate Efforts on Just Mineral Supply Chains?

To assert greater agency over its vast resources and critical minerals (CRMs) – crucial for the world’s energy and digital transitions – African countries look at the first African-led G20 as a big opportunity before the US takes over the presidency next year. In the words of its president Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa looks for a “grand bargain” that promotes value addition to critical minerals for inclusive growth and development.[1] Despite current global turbulences, the country offers a solid foundation for sustaining multifaceted diplomatic relationships across (very) diverse international partners,[2] thus hopes for a fruitful G20 are high. Canada’s parallel G7 presidency can be of help, as the strengthening of critical mineral supply chains is on top of the agenda[3] and likely one of the few topics where some progress is possible.

Local opportunities, global clashes

South Africa’s G20 presidency reached its mid-term, presenting a work programme centred on resilience-building, the realignment of financial flows and the pursuit of a just transition.[4] A sustainable exploitation of critical minerals is at the very core of these priorities: as geopolitical competition intensifies for reliable access to CRMs, the development ambitions of the countries where these are sourced risk being sidelined. The continent is indeed particularly affected by this dynamic.[5] To mention a few examples, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) currently accounts for around 70 per cent of global mined cobalt production while South Africa dominates global supplies of platinum-group metals; Africa currently accounts for 11 per cent of lithium output and 17 per cent of copper output. The market value of Africa’s energy minerals production stands at almost 50 billion US dollars for mining and 16 billion for refining in 2024, with announced projects indicating an overall growth to around 83 billion by 2040.[6] The continent is seeing growing investments in this domain, particularly from the Middle East and China.

However, Africa’s mining industry remains largely structured around a “pit-to-port” model that channels minerals elsewhere for their processing.[7] Local value addition has thus been little and with modest regard for environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, not really contributing to the economic and social progress of the countries involved. On the contrary, local processing could meet aspirations of sustainable industrialisation in Africa. The continent has almost 20 per cent of the global population and land area, while its contribution to economic output is about 3 per cent of global GDP and 2 per cent of the world’s manufacturing added value.[8] Creating jobs at the scale needed to cater for Africa’s growing (and very young) workforce involves radically expanding the manufacturing sector. The formulation of an African commodities strategy is indeed a flagship project of Agenda 2063,[9] and recognised by the South African G20 workplan.[10]

Global politics is however fractured around critical minerals. Everyone’s got their reason – be it development opportunities, industry, tech dominance ambitions or security. Blocs around critical minerals are taking shape, positioning Western nations against China and Russia. The growing attention to reduced dependency on rival markets additionally signals a departure from the principle of economic interdependence as a cornerstone of shared prosperity and stability. Mineral supply chains are now being determined less by market forces and more by governments’ policies. Indeed, each superpower has its own definitions that mark whether a mineral is considered ‘critical’ or ‘strategic’, with an additional layer of complexity provided by differences between minerals and their specific market structures.[11] There is likewise a growing understanding that, despite well-supplied markets, critical mineral supply markets have become more concentrated, not less.[12] These trends, in principle, offer mineral-abundant regions like Africa increased leverage to secure better negotiating positions and might likewise place them as Western policymakers’ first choice in their ‘diversification’ strategies. In practice, this is way more complex – not least because rising securitisation of supply chains worldwide could weaken international cooperation.

Africa’s vision: Partners, not offtakers

Africa’s recently published green minerals’ strategy clearly recognises the multifaceted risk the continent faces.[13] Downstream value addition constraints include trading rules, non-tariff barriers, subeconomic national markets and monopoly/oligopoly pricing of metals and intermediate feedstocks amongst others. Upstream constraints include skills and technology deficits as well as limited access to finance, amongst others. Additional limits arise from weak governance or corruption, lack of regional alignment on conditionalities, lack of infrastructures and limited access to reliable energy – just to name a few.

Most affected African nations have in parallel increasingly focused on policies that would ensure value addition for their mineral resources, aiming to maximise domestic benefits from their reserves. The DRC has temporarily banned cobalt exports in early 2025 to curb oversupply and stabilise global prices, part of a broader strategy to enhance its internal processing capabilities. Similarly, Zimbabwe enacted the Base Minerals Export Control Order in 2023 introducing stringent controls on lithium mining, processing, and exportation. Strategic local content policies (for instance, in Botswana) have also emerged, trying to boost the domestic private sector, facilitate technology transfer and build a competitive local workforce. As they seek a more active role to move along the value chain, the tools available to countries in the Global South are however profoundly different to those in richer countries. Many rely on localisation measures that may be read as resource nationalism. In this sense, there have been several policy U-turns in Africa as in several developing contexts, shifting from state monopolies (1960s-70s) to broad deregulation (1980s-90s) to attract international firms, to calls for greater standards recently.[14] Improving transparency has indeed been a progressively stronger ask in the region: the DRC is exerting pressure on the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region to enforce firmer tracing standards against illegal exports; Zambia introduced a digital platform (Zambia Integrated Mining Information System) to enhance transparency in managing mining licences.

This new approach explains the emphasis placed on partnerships based on ‘just’ principles. Consolidating win-win cooperation is imperative on supply chains as the scale of capital required to create both resilient and sustainable trade in these minerals is insurmountable for a single country or region. Figures for the cost of mineral investments needed for energy alone range from 590 billion US dollars to 2 trillion by 2040.[15] Moreover, important elements for future energy governance and demand are yet to be fully appreciated, such as the impact of a wider uptake of artificial intelligence systems.[16] If ill-managed these (still unclear) dynamics will also worsen the most important systemic threat the world has ever experienced: climate change. In parallel with innovations and efficiency, a more effective exploitation of minerals can help mitigate such impacts, while also integrating African requests – something the EU is for instance seeking to promote.[17]

Things are moving, slowly

G7 nations have all emphasised securing critical minerals as a strategic priority. Even Trump, despite his battle against climate change, has from the very first moment of his second mandate prioritised US critical minerals security through a range of domestic and foreign policy actions. Yet, existing G7 efforts to strengthen mineral supply chains have not generated the scale of capital needed.[18] In 2023, G7 countries collectively committed just 13 billion US dollars to domestic and international critical mineral initiatives. During the June G7 Summit in Canada, which South Africa attended, critical minerals cooperation was highlighted through a Critical Minerals Action Plan building on the Five-Point Plan for Critical Minerals Security established during Japan’s G7 Presidency in 2023 and advanced by Italy in 2024.[19] In the summit, leaders pledged to address barriers and support reforms to improve the investment climate for partners in low- and middle-income countries, including through the G20 Compact with Africa. This is an important move in the right direction. Indeed, critical minerals investment in the Global South – including Sub-Saharan Africa – are often high-risk,[20] long-term ventures that require large amounts of upfront capital. The mix of commodity price fluctuations,[21] political volatility and long timelines to profitability has frequently deterred private investors – a hurdle that Chinese state-owned enterprises are more protected from.

Furthermore, minerals’ markets have so far been unwilling to pay green premiums. This is however changing, with markets progressively requiring better standards that have started emerging in the past two decades. Nonetheless, with an estimated 25,000 mining companies globally and way more in the bigger mineral and metals value chain, the number of producers following no standards currently far outweighs those that do.[22] Canada’s leadership in global minerals investment and mining is a good ally as puts resource-rich countries at the centre of strategic efforts by major manufacturing nations to develop more diverse, secure and sustainable supply chains for critical minerals, while decoupling from dependency on China.

Teamwork with the US in this endeavour remains to be seen. Despite the big fracture provoked by Trump with the rest of the Western allies and his disbelief in multilateral processes, rare earths and other critical minerals remain, from the US’s perspective, a source of leverage for Beijing. Furthermore, the US cannot solve its critical minerals dependence alone, which implies the setup of actions to source them from overseas. In this sense, facilitating frameworks that increase coordination at the speed and scale necessary to secure Washington’s economic and security needs while diminishing reliance on Chinese supply chains should be in the US’s interest. Resource-rich countries are seeking investment in higher-value segments of the supply chain rather than the extractive segments alone and the US (together with the EU, UK, Canada, Japan and others) can coordinate concessional finance to strategic producers across these value chains. The success of achieving mineral security and sustainability goals will largely depend on how well these nations can collaborate on a global scale.


Margherita Bianchi is Head of the ‘Energy, climate and resources’ programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).

[1] South Africa, Davos 2025: Special Address by Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, 21 January 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-address-cyril-ramaphosa-president-south-africa.

[2] Christopher Vandome, “South Africa Can Mitigate Trump’s Ire through Economic Diplomacy and Non-Alignment”, in Chatham House Expert Comments, 1 April 2025, https://www.chathamhouse.org/node/36329.

[3] G7 website: Priorities for Canada’s G7 Presidency, https://g7.canada.ca/en/canadian-presidency/priorities.

[4] G20 website: G20 Presidency, https://g20.org/g20-south-africa/g20-presidency.

[5] Theophilus Acheampong, “Developing Green Value Chains: Collaborating for a Mutually Beneficial EU-Africa Partnership”, in IAI Commentaries, No. 24|62 (October 2024), https://www.iai.it/en/node/19065.

[6] International Energy Agency (IEA), Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, Paris, IEA, May 2025, p. 281-282, https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025.

[7] Adrian Joseph, “Africa is a Key Source of Critical Minerals for the Global Energy Transition – But there Are Hidden Dangers”, in Daily Maverick, 26 October 2023, https://saiia.org.za/?p=60655.

[8] UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Factsheet: Africa. Highlights from the International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics 2023, December 2023, https://www.unido.org/sites/default/files/unido-publications/2023-12/documents_Yearbook_2023_UNIDO_IndustrialStatistics_Yearbook_2023_Africa.pdf.

[9] AUDA-NEPAD website: African Commodity Strategy, https://www.nepad.org/node/13515.

[10] Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, “South Africa’s G20 Presidency: Placing African Concerns on the Global Table”, in International Banker, 27 June 2025, https://internationalbanker.com/?p=18692.

[11] Jiayi Zhou and André Månberger, Critical Minerals and Great Power Competition. An Overview, Stockholm, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, October 2024, https://doi.org/10.55163/WEMJ9585.

[12] IEA, Diversification Is the Cornerstone of Energy Security, Yet Critical Minerals Are Moving in the Opposite Direction, 21 May 2025, https://www.iea.org/news/diversification-is-the-cornerstone-of-energy-security-yet-critical-minerals-are-moving-in-the-opposite-direction.

[13] African Minerals Development Centre, Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy, Addis Ababa, African Union, December 2024, https://au.int/en/node/44539.

[14] Poorva Karkare, “Resource Nationalism in the Age of Green Industrialisation”, in ECDPM Discussion Papers, No. 365 (May 2024), p. 15, https://ecdpm.org/work/resource-nationalism-age-green-industrialisation.

[15] Resource Capital Funds, Paradigm Shift for Critical Mineral Investment, last updated 7 March 2025, https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/?p=2733.

[16] IEA, Energy and AI, Paris, IEA, April 2025, https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai.

[17] Max Münchmeyer, Strategic Security and Critical Raw Materials: The Role of the European Investment Bank, Rome, IAI, July 2023, https://www.iai.it/en/node/17351.

[18] Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz, “G7 Cooperation to De-risk Minerals Investments in the Global South”, in CSIS Commentaries, 7 May 2025, https://www.csis.org/node/116195.

[19] G7, G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, 17 June 2025, https://g7.canada.ca/en/news-and-media/news/g7-critical-minerals-action-plan.

[20] Max Münchmeyer, Strategic Security and Critical Raw Materials, cit.

[21] Shobhan Dhir, Eric Buisson and Tae-Yoon Kim, “Growing Geopolitical Tensions Underscore the Need for Stronger Action on Critical Minerals Security”, in IEA Commentaries, 9 February 2025, https://www.iea.org/commentaries/growing-geopolitical-tensions-underscore-the-need-for-stronger-action-on-critical-minerals-security.

[22] See the Consolidated Mining Standards Initiative website: https://miningstandardinitiative.org.