AFC has launched the Africa Strategic Minerals Compendium to de-risk exploration, reduce capital costs and guide smarter investments.
The agency aims to invest $1 billion annually in critical minerals.
Construction of the Lobito Corridor is scheduled to begin this year in Angola, Zambia.
Multilateral financial institution Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) today launched Africa’s Strategic Minerals Compendium, an initiative to map Africa’s mineral value chains, in Cape Town. The initiative aims to support long-term industrialization, infrastructure development and regional integration by improving data transparency across the continent’s mining and infrastructure sectors. This comes as the AFC prioritizes regional integration and low-risk investments, increasing financing for African mining and logistics.
Enhanced data transparency
Compendium of Africa’s Strategic Minerals maps various segments of Africa’s mining value chain, from exploration and production to infrastructure enablement and demand fundamentals. By increasing data transparency across the industry, Compendium aims to de-risk exploration and reduce capital costs, while guiding smarter investment in mining and broader infrastructure development.
Speaking at an event in Cape Town this week, AFC president and CEO Samaira Zubair described the compendium as “an effort to reshape the sector through an African lens and turn endowments into actionable channels for our collective prosperity. The compendium maps the complete value chain, linking reserves and production to processing capacity, power, transport infrastructure and regional industrial corridors.”
Infrastructure remains a bottleneck, but momentum is growing
The compendium puts infrastructure development at the heart of Africa’s minerals strategy, identifying challenges and opportunities in processing, power and transport connectivity. By mapping mineral deposits and production assets alongside railways, ports, power generation hubs and power grids, Compendium provides clearer investment paths for global partners and addresses one of the biggest constraints across Africa’s mining sector: infrastructure investment.
AFC is already leading large-scale regional infrastructure projects in Africa. Chief among these is the Lobito Corridor, which will connect the copper belt of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Angola’s Atlantic port of Lobito via modernized rail and logistics infrastructure, transforming the route for mineral exports. The corridor is expected to significantly reduce transportation costs, speed time-to-market and improve the bankability of upstream and midstream mining investments by shifting large volumes of mineral exports from road to rail.
“We are actively investing in transport and logistics. The Lobito Corridor is one example, a project that we will arrange as a leader. We are the ones who put in the first capital and we will ensure it is completed. We plan to break ground in both Angola and Zambia this year,” Shenouda added.
Expanding critical mineral financing
The launch of Compendium comes as AFC expands its financing of critical minerals across the continent. Sameh Shenouda, AFC’s executive director and chief investment officer, told a press conference that the company plans to invest $1 billion a year in critical minerals alone to strengthen Africa’s mining capacity as global demand is expected to triple by 2030.
This investment strategy builds on a strong capital pipeline for 2025. Speaking at Africa Mining Week 2025, AFC Deputy Director General and Head of Metals Mining, Franklin Edsey, said the AFC had disbursed $14 billion to projects in 36 countries through loans, equity investments and infrastructure support. These investments contributed $50 billion to Africa’s GDP, Edochie said.
As capital commitments accelerate, a key question for Africa is whether financing of this magnitude will translate into integrated value chains and export-ready infrastructure, or merely strengthen the continent’s role as a supplier of raw materials in rapidly tightening global mineral markets.
