Key Points
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WEF highlights that Southern Africa holds nearly 30 percent of global critical mineral reserves.
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Report says Africa attracts less than 10 percent of global exploration investment.
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Namibia, Zambia, and the Lobito Corridor show how projects can unlock regional growth.
Southern Africa is sitting on some of the world’s richest deposits of critical minerals, but the region risks losing out on the global clean energy boom unless investment gaps are closed, a new World Economic Forum (WEF) report warns.
The study, released on August 29, calls for faster action to unlock financing that can help the region meet rising demand for low-carbon technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines.
Region rich in global energy transition metals
Produced with the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and McKinsey & Company, the report examines ten countries: Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Sub-Saharan Africa holds nearly 30% of the world’s reserves of copper, cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese, chromium, vanadium and platinum group metals.
Yet the continent receives less than 10% of global exploration spending, revealing a sharp gap between its potential and actual investment flows.
“Southern Africa has the reserves the global energy transition needs, but financing is not keeping pace,” said Jörgen Sandström of the WEF Centre for Energy and Materials.
“Closing this gap is critical to both regional prosperity and global energy security.”
Risks of repeating old mistakes
DBSA CEO Boitumelo Mosako warned that without new approaches, the continent could once again see its resource wealth fail to translate into broad economic gains.
“If extraction continues as before, Africa will miss another chance to turn its mineral wealth into real socioeconomic transformation,” Mosako said.
The report outlines eight financing barriers holding the sector back: policy uncertainty, high investment risks, energy and transport challenges, slow innovation, weak industrialisation, limited skills, and demand volatility.
Examples of solutions already working
To counter these challenges, the WEF highlights successful initiatives already underway.
One is the Lobito Corridor, a railway project linking copper and cobalt regions in Zambia and the DRC to Angola’s Port of Lobito.
Supported by the EU, the US, Angola and the DBSA, the project is upgrading existing lines and adding an 800 km extension to ease export bottlenecks and stimulate regional trade.
Another case is Namibia’s green iron project. In April, the country launched Africa’s first industrial-scale green iron facility, powered entirely by renewables. Using solar energy, battery storage and the region’s largest electrolyser, the plant produces zero-emissions iron.
Backed by the EU-Namibia Green Hydrogen Partnership, the facility plans to grow from 15,000 tonnes a year to two million tonnes by 2030.
In Zambia, reforms are helping rebuild investor confidence in mining. Copper output is set to rise from 700,000 tonnes to one million tonnes by 2026, with a national target of three million tonnes by 2031.
The report concludes that scaling up such efforts could make Southern Africa a cornerstone of the global energy transition while driving inclusive local growth.
