It has been some months since I last wrote here. One question pulled me back: as the world scrambles for Africa’s critical minerals, who carries the cost, and who captures the value?

Africa is setting new terms

Something is shifting across the continent. In February 2026, Zimbabwe suspended exports of unprocessed minerals, including lithium concentrate, and now requires miners to process ore into lithium sulphate at home before a full ban on raw exports takes effect in January 2027. The DRC suspended cobalt exports in 2025 to assert control over the world’s most important battery mineral. Malawi banned raw mineral exports last October. The African Union is pushing green mineral value chains as a continental agenda.

I support this turn. I have argued for years that Africa’s debt distress and its raw commodity dependence are one disease. A continent that exports rock and imports batteries will always borrow to fill the gap. Beneficiation keeps the processing margin at home. It is sound economics and overdue justice. But as I follow these debates, from quota announcements to chamber of mines negotiations, I notice what the ledger leaves out. We are counting tonnes, taxes and plant capacity. We are still refusing to count care.

The other supply chain

Every mine runs on two supply chains. The first is visible: ore, trucks, plants, ports. The second is invisible, unpaid and overwhelmingly female. It is the woman who walks further for clean water because the local source is degraded. It is the grandmother nursing a miner’s damaged lungs, the mother feeding a household on land shrunk by displacement, the girl who leaves school to carry the domestic load. The ILO estimates that women perform more than three quarters of the world’s unpaid care work. In mining communities, extraction quietly increases that load and books the saving as profit.

The evidence is continental. A March 2026 UNCTAD report on women in critical energy transition minerals found women in the DRC’s cobalt chain concentrated in the lowest paid, most hazardous roles and almost absent from management and ownership. It warned that value addition creates the better jobs, and that women are being left out of them unless governments act deliberately. Feminist researchers across SADC and the Great Lakes document the same pattern: displacement, degraded environments and rising gender-based violence, while women are excluded from negotiations, compensation and ownership.

The arithmetic is uncomfortable. When a mine pollutes a river, the company’s accounts record nothing. The cost appears in a woman’s day. Unpaid care absorbs the externalities that formal accounting refuses to see. The care economy subsidises the extractive economy.

From extraction to resource creation

So the call is bigger than export bans. Africa’s minerals must create resources, meaning domestic revenue, public infrastructure and human capability, rather than simply changing where the smelter sits. Three things would move us there.

Count care. Export quotas and mining licences across the continent should carry gender and care audits alongside financial and environmental conditions. What we refuse to measure, we license.

Fund care from mineral wealth. A defined share of mineral revenue should be ring-fenced for water, health, childcare and schools in mining districts. This is domestic resource mobilisation in its truest form: converting extraction into the public goods that free women’s time and build the workforce the new processing economy needs.

Set one African standard. The AU and regional blocs like SADC should adopt a common gender and care standard for transition minerals, so companies cannot arbitrage between our countries and extract where protections are weakest. A continent negotiating together sets terms and when countries negotiate alone, they take them.

The energy transition is being marketed to Africa as our moment. Perhaps it is. But a moment can pass through a continent without touching its people, and when the dust settles it is usually women left sweeping it. Beneficiation asks why the value of our minerals is realised in someone else’s economy. Care justice asks why the costs are realised in women’s bodies and women’s time. Answer both, and mineral wealth becomes real resource creation: revenue, infrastructure, capability and dignity. Answer only the first, and we will have industrialised an old injustice and called it transformation.