Africa holds an outsized share of the world’s critical energy transition minerals (CETMs), yet its role in global value chains remains largely extractive. This brief argues that African countries and their partners must reshape their approach to CETMs, ensuring that extraction, processing, and manufacturing contribute to sustainable industrialisation, economic diversification, and local value addition.

 Recent global initiatives, including the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, Global Gateway, and the US-led Mineral Security Partnership, aim to establish alternative CETM supply chains. These strategies include addressing local priorities such as governance, community participation, and environmental sustainability in their preambles, but the full implementation of these principles is still lacking. Meanwhile, Africa’s existing frameworks, such as the Africa Mining Vision and the Africa Green Minerals Strategy, remain underutilised due to weak implementation, elite-driven policies, and insufficient integration into global trade systems. The risk of replicating past extractive models is evident in projects like the Lobito Corridor and the EU–Namibia’s critical minerals agreement, which – while promising – expose gaps in Africa’s ability to dictate terms of engagement.

This brief proposes a three-pronged approach to transforming Africa’s CETM sector, namely (1) regional industrial policy leading to African-based value addition – enhancing processing and manufacturing capacities to break dependence on raw material exports and leveraging the African Continental Free Trade Area to reduce intra-African competition that leads to a “green race to the bottom”; (2) people-centred governance – ensuring local participation in decision-making through free, prior, and informed consent, community benefit agreements, and strengthened formal and artisanal labour protections and rights; (3) transformation of global industrial financing mechanisms and technology transfer agreements to support Africa’s green industrialisation; and (4) shaping Europe–Africa cooperation and trade relations through the development of common standards for secure and resilient CETM supply chains.