Month: July 2026

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Governance, Conflict and Critical Minerals: 7 Propositions for Africa’s Future

Three days in Accra (27-29 July 2026) kept circling back to a single triangle: governance, conflict and critical minerals, and how tightly the three are bound together. Where governance is transparent, accountable and inclusive, minerals become a foundation for peace and shared prosperity. Where it is weak or captured, the same minerals become a driver of exclusion, instability and, too often, war, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan to Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado. Our final plenary did not treat these as three separate conversations. It treated governance as the variable that decides which way the other two tip, and it converged on seven propositions built on that premise, concrete enough to act on Monday morning, ambitious enough to still matter in ten years.

1. Make Ownership Visible

Nothing else on this list matters if citizens cannot see who profits from what comes out of their soil. That starts with beneficial ownership registers that end opaque permitting and unmonitored contracts, and with legal and policy frameworks built specifically for the energy-transition era rather than retrofitted from decades-old mining codes. Human rights and environmental protection have to sit inside that foundation from the start, not arrive as an afterthought once the contracts are already signed. Transparency is not a compliance checkbox, it is the precondition for everything that follows, and it is where every other proposition on this list begins.

2. Turn Consultation into Ownership

Communities have been consulted for decades. What they have rarely been given is a stake, and exclusion, not scarcity, is what turns a mining region into a conflict zone. The room pointed to models that already exist and work: the Bafokeng arrangement in South Africa and comparable Australian examples, where community ownership and revenue equity are structural, not symbolic. That principle has to extend to the estimated 150,000 artisanal miners in Kenya alone, through formalization, licensing, skills, financing, safer practices, and to the communities left exposed to unregulated private security forces, a conflict driver raised pointedly in the Nigerian context. None of it holds without protecting the people who expose corruption when it happens: whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights defenders. Governance reform means nothing if the people doing the accountability work aren’t safe doing it.

3. Mandate Value Addition, Not Just Extraction

Africa’s oldest mineral trap is exporting raw material and importing the finished product. The fix has to be written into contracts themselves: local value addition mandated from extraction through processing, not left to goodwill or market forces. This is where the continent’s industrial future is actually decided, not in the mine, but in whether the processing, manufacturing and skills development happen here or somewhere else. Every proposition above depends on this one holding: ownership and community equity mean little if the value they’re entitled to share in keeps leaving the continent unprocessed.

4. Build Strong Continental Institutions

Rather than wait another twenty years for 55 countries to align, the AfCFTA‘s own timeline was raised, more than once, as a cautionary tale, the room pushed toward institutions with real financial and legal weight. A Pan-African Sovereign Wealth Fund to finance skills development, green industrial policy and compliance monitoring. A Pan-African Critical Minerals Council bringing mining chambers, chambers of commerce, central bank governors and technical experts to one table. A functional African Commodities Exchange, already operating across sixteen countries and linked to AfCFTA, proof this is not purely aspirational. And standardized templates for strategic partnership agreements, so no single government negotiates alone against far better-resourced global counterparts. These institutions are what turn Propositions 1 through 3 from national good intentions into continental practice.

5. Close the Enforcement Gap, Don’t Just Widen It

The single most important intervention from our closing session was also the most uncomfortable: new instruments without a supervision mandate just become paper. We already have mining codes. We already have an African Mining Vision, we already have a progressive Africa’s Green Mineral Strategy. The gap has never been imagination, it is enforcement, and the alignment between what continental frameworks promise and what national law actually delivers. That means evaluating and reviving what already exists before building new instruments on top of one we never finished implementing, and it means giving Open Society Foundations and partners, an evaluative role that multiple participants asked for directly: assess the real implementation gap and support a citizen-facing tracking dashboard so civil society can do the accountability work governments are unlikely to do on themselves. This proposition is the test the other six will ultimately be judged by, whether the dashboard tracking our own promises actually goes live.

6. Build the Tools, Not Just the Asks

We were rightly challenged to move beyond broad recommendations and develop practical instruments that policymakers, communities, and advocates can immediately use. These should include a model strategic partnership agreement and a standardized beneficial ownership registry template to operationalize Proposition 1. For Proposition 2, we need a community-level free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) standard that is legally enforceable, not merely an aspiration contained in an international document.

Our advocacy must also focus on a concrete and immediate opportunity: securing the ratification of the statute establishing the African Minerals Development Centre. This is an existing AU commitment awaiting sufficient ratifications and therefore represents an achievable near-term win, distinct from the longer-term institution-building agenda set out in Proposition 4. Strengthening the African Legal Support Facility at the African Development Bank should also be part of this effort, giving Member States the technical and legal capacity to negotiate mineral agreements collectively and from a position of strength, rather than in isolation.

7. Negotiate as One Africa

We are not negotiating in a vacuum. The United States, Russia, China, and now the EU through Global Gateway, are actively reshaping their national mining policies, in some cases, even constitutions. Much of that financing is debt, not grants, and several of our countries are already highly leveraged from oil and gas; ownership rhetoric has to be matched with honest debt-risk analysis, or we simply repeat the extractive cycle in a new form, with better branding. The only viable counterweight, raised again and again in the room, is unity: a common continental negotiating position, backed by a political and advocacy engagement strategy with the African Union and its Member States, and by engaging ECOSOCC, the AU’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council, to broaden this coalition well beyond the people who happened to be in Accra with us.

That coalition is where all seven propositions ultimately have to live, not as seven separate initiatives, but as one continental position on the same triangle we opened with: governance, conflict and critical minerals, and the conviction that the first can be made strong enough to defuse the second and make the third a genuine foundation for peace.

This is the work carried forward by the Open Society Foundations across our Democratic Futures, Transformative Peace and Resource Futures in Africa Programs, and by every government, institution and movement that sat in this room with us. Accra was the diagnosis and the design. These seven propositions are what we build next.

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Inside the Accra Strategic Gathering on Governance, Critical Minerals and Conflict in Africa

There is a particular kind of energy that fills a room when people stop asking whether a problem exists and start asking what to build instead. I felt that shift this week in Accra, where I have spent two days (27, 28 July 2026) with States actors, advisers to the Presidency of Ghana, continental  and regional institution representatives, civil society and religious leaders, lawyers, private sector actors, journalists, and young people, all of us grappling with one question: how does Africa make sure its critical mineral wealth becomes a foundation for peace, democracy and prosperity, rather than another chapter in the resource curse?

Why We Gathered

We are told Africa holds a third of the world’s known reserves of minerals cobalt, lithium, manganese, coltan, graphite, rare earths, that the global economy now needs to power the transition to clean energy, digital technology and advanced manufacturing. That is an extraordinary opportunity. It is also, as our President Binaifer Nowrojee reminded us in her opening remarks, a profound responsibility, because history has shown repeatedly that natural resource wealth does not automatically translate into human development, democratic progress or peace. Too often, the communities living closest to these resources carry the greatest social and environmental costs while seeing the fewest benefits.

That is the paradox this conference set out to confront. Convened under the banner of governance, critical minerals and conflict, and grounded in a simple but consequential proposition, that the relationship between minerals, peace and development is not predetermined, and that governance is the variable that decides which way it tips; the meeting brought together an unusually broad coalition. Not just the ministries and mining actors who typically populate this conversation, but artisanal miners, women’s networks, youth movements, researchers and peacebuilders who are already doing the work of reimagining the sector from the ground up.

A Governance Crisis Wearing a Resource Costume

If there was a single idea that ran through every session on Day One, it was this: mineral wealth does not create development on its own. Governance is what makes the difference.

Bishop Matthew Kukah’s keynote reframed the conversation from the outset, arguing that resources themselves carry no curse, it is how they are captured, manipulated and instrumentalized by political and external elites that turns opportunity into exploitation. Other speakers built on that provocation. Brian Kagoro described how mineral discoveries tend to concentrate political and economic power around ruling elites, weakening institutions and excluding citizens from decisions that shape their own futures. One phrase from the day’s discussions captured the mood better than any policy paper could: what Africa faces is less a resource curse than a governance crisis wearing a resource costume.

The human cost of that crisis was made vivid through case after case. Suliman Baldo described Sudan’s war as, in his words, a struggle over economic assets in which mining wealth concentrated within military structures helped turn instability into devastating conflict, what he called “Africa’s nightmare.” The Democratic Republic of Congo came up repeatedly as the starkest illustration of what happens when strategic mineral wealth meets weak institutions and armed actors. Across these examples, the lesson was consistent: where governance fails, minerals become drivers of insecurity rather than engines of development.

From Extraction to Transformation

A second thread ran through the day’s discussions: Africa’s long habit of exporting raw materials and importing the finished products made from them. The continent exports bauxite and imports aluminium; exports lithium and cobalt and imports battery components; exports copper and imports the electrical goods made with it. Jerry Ahadjie of the African Development Bank drew a sharp distinction between the old “corridor model” of mine-railway-port-export, and a transformational model in which infrastructure is built to support processing, manufacturing, skills development and community participation before minerals ever leave the continent. The African Development Bank’s new Critical Minerals Accelerator Facility, along with emerging investments in battery manufacturing and processing across Ghana, Morocco, Tanzania, South Africa and the DRC, were offered as early signs that this shift is possible.

Bright Simons pushed the room further, warning against what he called “zombie statistics”,  the often-repeated figures about Africa’s mineral endowment that circulate without rigorous grounding in local data, and that are frequently defined by what Washington, Beijing or Brussels consider “critical” rather than what actually serves African industrialization. His challenge was blunt: Africa cannot negotiate its own future while relying on data, definitions and narratives it does not own.

The Human Face of the Sector

Some of the most powerful interventions came from those who insisted the conversation stay grounded in people. Petronille Vaweka spoke about women in artisanal mining communities performing the most demanding labour, sometimes for as little as a dollar a day, while remaining largely absent from the negotiations and decisions that shape their working lives. Rachael Mwikali spoke to the growing role of young people, women and grassroots digital activists in demanding accountability from the ground up. Awa Baldé, drawing on international human rights frameworks, reminded us that consultation is not the same as genuine participation, and warned of growing threats against environmental defenders. The message that emerged, again and again: communities cannot keep bearing the costs of extraction while others capture the benefits.

Strategy Labs: Turning Diagnosis into Design

Day Two moved the conversation from analysis to design, through parallel Strategy Labs that asked participants to translate the previous day’s diagnosis into concrete recommendations.

I had the privilege of contributing to several of these conversations directly, one on livelihood security and local development, and another, which I helped report back to plenary, on industrialization, economic sovereignty and what we framed as “Transforming Africa’s Development: The Moment, Critical Mineral Industrialization and Economic Sovereignty.”

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That lab surfaced a hard truth: Africa is not short of policy commitments. Frameworks like the African Mining Vision, Africa Green Mineral Strategy and the African Mining and Development Centre already exist. What is missing is the machinery to hold governments accountable to them, and the regional solidarity needed to negotiate contracts from a position of strength rather than country by country. We also flagged the disconnect between universities and industry, and between mining and manufacturing, as quiet but persistent obstacles to building real value chains on the continent. Our recommendations, a continental mechanism to monitor implementation of existing commitments, a coordinated African negotiating position backed by pooled legal capacity, stronger links between government, academia and industry, and a renewed push for local procurement and processing, echoed strongly with what other labs were hearing in parallel rooms on livelihoods, conflict prevention and regional cooperation.

Across all four labs, certain recommendations kept resurfacing regardless of which room they came from: publish mining contracts and make ownership traceable; invest in African-owned geological data; build community benefit-sharing frameworks with real teeth; support strategic litigation where communities have been denied redress; strengthen community-based conflict early-warning systems; and above all, anchor everything in an Accra Declaration backed by a genuine monitoring and evaluation mechanism, so that this conference produces a living commitment rather than another report that gathers dust.

A Conversation the World Could See: None of this would have carried the way it has without the work happening just outside the conference rooms. Ruth Omondi, our communication champion and her team of journalists made sure this gathering did not stay contained within Accra’s walls. Through a steady stream of interviews and media engagement, they carried these conversations on governance, on conflict, on the future of Africa’s mineral wealth, out to a much wider public than the delegates in the room. That visibility matters. A conference like this only becomes a turning point if the ideas it produces reach the people, governments and institutions who were not there to hear them firsthand, and Ruth’s team has made sure they have.

What Comes Next: As I write this, the conference is moving into its final day of synthesis, turning three days of rich, sometimes uncomfortable, always urgent conversation into a shared framework and a set of commitments that African governments, regional institutions and civil society can be held to. The line that has stayed with me from the Day One recap by my colleague Tem Mbuh is this: “history will not remember us for the resources beneath our soil. It will remember us for what we chose to build with them”.

That is the work now in front of all of us, and it is why Open Society Foundations came to Accra to help convene this conversation, and why we will stay engaged long after we leave Accra.