JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Leading Investing in African Mining Indaba 2026 voices this week unpacked how regional integration promotion, pan-African partnerships and policy alignment are accelerating Africa’s mining transformation, which is in turn promising to catalyse energy and transport infrastructure development, industrial and manufacturing activity, skills demand, and employment creation on the continent.

As Africa’s biggest mining platform, the Mining Indaba is helping to build momentum towards the realisation of a timely new Africa partnership era.

The influential voices promoting continental and regional integration as the engine of Africa’s mining transformation ahead of next year’s major mining event include Mining Indaba executive advisory board chairperson Frans Baleni, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa economic affairs officer Dr Marit Kitaw, Mining Indaba head of government partnerships Zeinab El-Sayed, and Mining Indaba product director Laura Nicholson, who took the opportunity to announce a partnership with ICMM, which has chosen Mining Indaba to premiere a documentary on the world's deepest underground marathon, the world first that took place in a zinc mine in Sweden last month 1 120 m below sea level.

“Yes, it's exciting to see what happened in an underground mine in the world's deepest marathon ever, but it stands for so much more,” Nicholson remarked during the media briefing, where Baleni emphasised the alignment of next year’s Mining Indaba theme to this year’s G20, Kitaw spoke of the crucial importance of the development of African skills and institutional capacity, and El-Sayed pointed out that regional integration also required trust and thrived on the positive relationships that were developed around it.

“Just after we, as a continent, will have hosted the G20, we’ll also be finding solutions at Mining Indaba that are about partnership, working together, integrating the region, and inclusive involvement,” Baleni said in response to Mining Weekly.

“We really need to invest in skills and technology, because at the end of the day, if you don’t have the appropriate skills or the technology, it just becomes a pipedream,” Kitaw cautioned.

“When we talk about regional integration, we often think about big infrastructure or trade corridors, which are critical.

“But integration is also about something that's a bit less tangible. It's about trust between governments, between regions, between policy makers and private sector, because the resources under the soil aren't the real engine of the kind of mining transformation that we all want to see on the continent. It's the relationships that we build around it,” El-Sayed remarked.

“Africa needs action,” said Baleni.

“Regional integration emphasises regional mineral corridors, putting our voices together, having an African agency,” Kitaw stated.

“Regional integration links mining to energy, energy to infrastructure, infrastructure to manufacturing, and ultimately, all of that to jobs growth,” El-Sayed pointed out.

“We need to break down the silos of how we work and come together,” Nicholson noted.

The journalists present also heard from Kitaw that “critical minerals have now become a currency. We talk about cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), manganese in South Africa, graphite in Mozambique, platinum and gold in South Africa, and I can go on, so we have the endowments, but to have economies of scale and bargaining, you need to have regional integration.”

Making these conversations much less about what divides everybody and much more about what connects everybody was urged by El-Sayed, while Nicholson expressed the need for Africa to also begin to celebrate the many successes that have already taken place on continent.

INCLUSIVE GROWTH

Leveraging minerals for sustainable development and inclusive growth was outlined by Kitaw as the way to go, amid this failing to be the case in the past 100 years of mining in Africa.

The African Mining Vision was developed by Africans in 2009, 16 years ago, at the time of another commodities boom, and the realisation of a lack of inclusivity is what prompted this vision.

“Now, 16 years on, it's not all gloom. Most of the 20 main producing African countries, have reviewed their minerals policies and codes, and they’re more or less aligned with the principles of the Africa Mining Vision, but there has not been a trickle down.

“So that's why the topic of today is about regional integration… because one country is not enough,” Kitaw remarked.

The symposium at next year’s Mining Indaba takes place on the Sunday, and it will bring together leaders from countries including South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, the DRC, Botswana, and Angola, who will showcase what regional collaboration can look like.

“All the conversations that we'll be hosting, including around critical minerals beneficiation and local content, are designed to connect national priorities to Africa's broader transformation agenda.

“But integration isn't only a government project. It's also about aligning the incentives of everyone in the ecosystem, the financiers, the mining companies, the innovators around a shared goal.

“At the Mining Indaba, we're lucky to have a platform where those voices actually meet, and that policy isn't discussed in isolation from practice.

“That's why these dialogues are so important because they really set the stage for the bigger conversations that come.

“Integration isn't a destination. It's a discipline. It's about doing the often-unglamorous work of aligning systems and timelines and priorities,” El-Sayed remarked.

“While we respect and we understand the value of the international partners that we have in the US, Canada, Australia, and China, to a large extent next year, we really want to help and facilitate so that the continent rises and becomes a force for power in its own right, and can build great economies and be strong in its own right. From a mining perspective, Africa has the minerals. Now we need to take it to the next step and the time to do that is now,” said Nicholson.

Mining Indaba takes place in Cape Town from February 9 to 12.