Although Africa’s mineral wealth is widely known, the continent continues to lose promising mining assets to foreign buyers long before they reach full value.
At the recently concluded Africa Investment Forum in Rabat, Morocco, experts described this as one of the continent’s most costly structural deficiencies, saying the gap is not rooted in geology but in a lack of early-stage funding.
They highlighted that in many countries, local license holders often sell exploration rights for a fraction of their potential value simply because they are unable to obtain funding for drilling, geological surveys and feasibility studies.
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Without this initial technical work, African companies would be forced to exit too soon, leaving foreign investors to capture downstream profits once resources are proven, they said.
“Africa is not running out of minerals, it’s running out of risk capital. The early stages of the extraction cycle are where all the value is created, but it’s also where African investors and banks disappear. So we end up selling billions of dollars of assets for millions,” said Nina Yosse, acting executive for metals, mining, infrastructure and energy at the South African Industrial Development Corporation.
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“Without exploration capital, African players are effectively operating blind. If they don’t know the real value of what they have, they can’t get a fair deal. Foreign buyers come with data, engineers and geologists. Local holders only have licenses. This is not a fair negotiation,” she added.
They emphasized that the impact of this imbalance extends far beyond the loss of property rights.
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“Once Africa sells too soon, it misses out on opportunities to influence pricing, control refining and processing, and develop local supply chains. Giving up exploration rights means giving up decades of economic growth,” said Begna Ghebreyesus, head of heavy industry, communications and technology at the African Finance Corporation.
“We lose jobs, downstream industries and the bargaining power that comes with owning resources from discovery to production,” he added.
Ghebreyesus said closing this funding gap is essential if Africa is to participate meaningfully in the world’s important mineral markets.
“International investors often prefer to buy risk-free deposits rather than fund initial exploration themselves, making it even more urgent for African institutions to step in. If Africa doesn’t fund exploration, someone else will and they will own the mines. We can’t keep outsourcing discovery, but that’s where the real wealth begins,” he noted.
Guy Robert Lukama, chairman of Democratic Republic of Congo mining company Gecamins, said governments, development banks and private investors need to design dedicated exploration funds, improve geological data systems and create incentives for African companies to stay in the value chain longer.
“Without these structural changes, Africa will have export opportunities long before it exports its minerals. The continent’s biggest losses will occur before the minerals reach the surface,” he said.
Lukama argued that the tragedy is not that Africa lacks minerals, but that the continent continues to abandon upstream value because it lacks the capital to prove what is actually there.
“If African governments and financiers do not intervene at the exploration stage, we will continue to build mines on other people’s balance sheets. The opportunity is ours and it is the data that allows us to claim it,” he added.
