Between 10 and 12 million young Africans enter the labour market each year. The formal economy absorbs roughly 3 million of them. The gap reopens every twelve months and compounds.

That arithmetic sits underneath the continent’s other two crises. As of 2024, 847 million people worldwide lived in extreme poverty. Rates fell in almost every region. In Sub-Saharan Africa they did not, and the region recovered its pre-Covid poverty rate only in 2025, after five years of reversal. Inequality follows the same contour. Several Southern African states carry a Gini coefficient above 0.60, which places the sub-region among the most unequal in the world.

Policy treats unemployment, poverty and inequality as three problems and writes three strategies against them. They are one problem observed from three positions. An economy that cannot generate work cannot reduce poverty at scale. An economy that distributes income through rents rather than wages concentrates whatever wealth it produces. The triple burden is the symptom. The cause is a productive structure that makes almost nothing.

Endowment without employment

The endowment is not in question. Africa holds a majority of global cobalt reserves and the bulk of the world’s platinum group metals. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the world’s leading cobalt producer by a wide margin, though the United States Geological Survey notes that companies owned or controlled by China account for most of the cobalt actually produced there.

What happens to that endowment is the problem. The Economic Commission for Africa calculates that Africa exports over 80 percent of its mineral output in raw form. The continent stands at the front of the queue for the world’s energy transition and at the back of the queue for the income it generates.

Zimbabwe shows what this does to a labour market. The Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe reports that mining now constitutes 80 percent of national export earnings, 14.5 percent of national income and close to 20 percent of government revenue. Mineral exports reached US$7.3 billion in 2025, up from US$5.9 billion in 2024. The industry formally employs around 60,000 people.

Four fifths of everything the country sells abroad rests on a payroll of 60,000 in a population of some 16 million. The Chamber puts a further 500,000 livelihoods in the small-scale sector, largely outside contracts, safety regulation, pensions and collective bargaining. They carry most of the risk and hold none of the protection.

Extraction is an efficient technology for generating export receipts and a poor one for generating work. A pit and a processing plant absorb capital and shed labour by design. Where the entire external position rests on an activity that employs almost nobody, the result is predictable: rising mineral revenues, static employment, and an inequality curve that steepens with each boom.

The wider trend confirms it. Africa’s share of global manufacturing has fallen from roughly 3 percent in the 1970s to under 2 percent. Manufacturing value added has been stuck below 13 percent of continental GDP since 2020. The continent is deindustrialising while holding the inputs to the world’s next industrial revolution.

Mobilisation and creation

Development finance runs on a single verb. Domestic resource mobilisation. Mobilising private capital. Mobilising the diaspora. Mobilising climate finance. The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda made mobilisation the organising principle of the field, and every finance ministry in Africa now holds a DRM strategy.

Mobilisation asks how to capture more of the value that already exists. Widen the tax base. Raise royalty rates. Renegotiate the fiscal regime. Close the leaks. Each of those actions is necessary, and much of my working life has been spent arguing for them.

Mobilisation also takes the shape of the economy as given. It assumes the value is produced by an existing structure and that the task is to claim a larger share of it in transit. Raise Zimbabwe’s mineral royalty by five percentage points and the treasury collects more from the same 60,000 jobs. The fiscal position improves. The labour market stays where it is.

Resource creation asks a different question: what can this economy make that it cannot make today? It builds productive capacity. Plants, skills, firms, energy, supplier networks, standards bodies, engineers. It alters what a country is capable of producing, which alters who can work, which alters how income is distributed before the tax system touches it.

Mobilisation redistributes a fixed output through the fiscus. Creation expands output through the payroll. The first addresses inequality after the fact. The second addresses it at source, because a wage bill spreads income across households in a way that a royalty transfer into the Consolidated Revenue Fund cannot.

The scale of what is at stake is documented. The IMF estimates global revenues from copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium extraction at around US$16 trillion over the next 25 years, with Sub-Saharan Africa positioned to capture over 10 percent, sufficient to raise regional GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050. Whether that value arrives as jobs or as royalties depends entirely on where the processing sits and who owns it.

The Indonesian precedent

Indonesia is the comparator most often cited and it deserves a full reading.

Jakarta banned raw nickel ore exports outright in 2020. Nickel export value rose from about US$6 billion in 2013 to roughly US$30 billion by 2022. The smelter count moved from 17 in 2019 to 48 by September 2023. In the first half of 2025 nickel exports reached US$16.5 billion, overtaking coal as the country’s leading export. Processed nickel commands a price many multiples that of raw ore, which is the whole logic of the policy.

The qualifications are less frequently quoted. Roughly US$30 billion of the downstream investment came from Chinese firms, which relocated the processing without relocating the ownership. The environmental and occupational safety record at several industrial parks has generated sustained domestic protest. In November 2022 a WTO panel found the export ban and the domestic processing requirement inconsistent with Indonesia’s GATT obligations and unjustified by any available exception. Indonesia appealed into a vacuum, since the Appellate Body has no sitting members, and the ruling remains unenforced.

Industrial policy of this kind is legally contested, capital-hungry, and only as good as the ownership and labour terms attached to it. The ambition is worth copying. The terms are not.

Zimbabwe’s lithium ban and its limits

Zimbabwe banned raw lithium ore exports in December 2022 and will ban lithium concentrate exports from January 2027. Government has refused industry requests for a waiver. This is real policy with measurable effect, and Zimbabwe moved before most of the continent.

The first result arrived in the first quarter of 2026. Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt began producing lithium sulphate at a US$400 million plant at the Arcadia mine in Goromonzi, with capacity above 50,000 tonnes a year. It is the largest facility of its kind in Africa and a genuine step up the value chain. It is also wholly owned by Huayou. A second lithium sulphate plant is under development at Bikita Minerals, owned by China’s Sinomine.

The export ban changed the customs code. It has yet to change who owns the plant, who holds the process technology, who trains the metallurgists, or where the retained earnings settle. A refinery at Goromonzi owned entirely offshore relocates the smokestack and leaves the ownership question untouched.

Location policy asks where processing happens. Development policy asks who owns it, who is trained by it, who supplies it, and who sits on its board.

The conditions for creation

Five requirements, none of them novel. All of them unfinanced.

Ownership terms written into the licence. Minimum state or citizen equity, local procurement schedules with dates attached, technology transfer clauses subject to verification, and skills transfer obligations audited annually. These belong in the licence with revocation attached, rather than in a memorandum of understanding.

Power. No smelter runs on load-shedding. Every beneficiation strategy in Southern Africa is drafted as though the electricity question will resolve itself. Processing capacity and generation capacity form a single project and should be financed as one.

Regional scale. National markets are too small to justify the plants. The DRC and Zambia agreed in March 2023 to a transboundary special economic zone producing nickel-manganese-cobalt battery precursors. A BloombergNEF study put the cost at US$2.7 billion and found a cathode precursor plant in the DRC roughly three times cheaper to build than its United States equivalent. Three years on, the financing is still being sought. This is the clearest test of whether AfCFTA carries any weight in heavy industry.

Care infrastructure. Industrial employment does not reach households without childcare, reliable transport and health cover. Women’s labour force participation determines whether an industrial strategy reaches half the population or a quarter of it. Care provision is industrial policy.

Transparency. UNCTAD puts illicit financial flows out of Africa at around US$88.6 billion a year, some 3.7 percent of GDP. Extractive commodities accounted for over US$40 billion of that in 2015 alone, 77 percent of it concentrated in the gold supply chain. Public contract registers, beneficial ownership disclosure and enforceable public debt transparency under sections 298 to 305 of the Constitution constitute the financing plan for industrialisation, and should be pursued as part of the same agenda.

The implementation deficit

Africa’s constraint is not the absence of a vision. The African Mining Vision was adopted in 2009 and set out the case for resource-based industrialisation with considerable clarity. Domestication across member states has been slow and uneven ever since. The African Green Minerals Strategy was adopted by Heads of State at the 38th AU Assembly in February 2025, and it states the correct positions on value chains, beneficiation, local content and stewardship.

It will join the AMV on the shelf unless three things accompany it: financing attached to named plants, enforcement attached to specific licences, and a reporting line that identifies ministers when milestones are missed. Strategy documents are cheap. Smelters are not.

The order of operations

Domestic resource mobilisation should continue. Close the loopholes, raise the royalties, pursue the illicit flows, litigate the opaque contracts. That work funds the state.

Mobilisation alone will produce a better-funded government presiding over the same jobless economy. No tax regime can compensate for a productive structure that employs 60,000 people to generate four fifths of national exports. The triple burden lifts when Africans make things.

Africa’s leverage over global mineral supply is real and time-bound. It lasts as long as the chemistry holds and the substitutes stay expensive, and the terms are being negotiated now. Spending that leverage on a marginally larger cheque would be the costlier of the two available mistakes.

---

Sources: World Bank, Poverty and Inequality Platform, March 2026 update; World Bank, Inequality in Southern Africa, 2022; African Development Bank, Jobs for Youth in Africa; United States Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026; UN Economic Commission for Africa on raw mineral exports and the DRC–Zambia transboundary battery and electric vehicle Special Economic Zone; Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe, Annual Report 2025; Institute for Security Studies, Africa Manufacturing Forecast, 2025; IMF, Harnessing Sub-Saharan Africa’s Critical Mineral Wealth, April 2024; CSIS on Indonesian downstreaming; WTO Panel Report WT/DS592/R, 30 November 2022; S&P Global and Reuters on Zimbabwe’s lithium concentrate export ban and Huayou lithium sulphate production; BloombergNEF prefeasibility study on the DRC–Zambia SEZ; UNCTAD, Economic Development in Africa Report 2020; African Union, Africa Mining Vision, 2009; African Development Bank briefing note on the Africa Green Minerals Strategy, 2025.