By: Shirley Webber - Managing Principle and Coverage Head for Resources and Energy at Absa CIB, and Stephen Seaka, Managing Executive for Public Sector and Growth Capital Solutions at Absa CIB

In 2023, a mine operating along the Central African Copperbelt moved its first test consignment through the Lobito Corridor, using the refurbished rail spine that links the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola’s Atlantic coast. Roughly 1100 tonnes of copper concentrate from the Kamoa-Kakula complex in Kolwezi were loaded at the Impala Terminals facility and sent west by rail to the Port of Lobito. The journey took eight days. Until this trial run, more than nine-tenths of the mine’s output had been routed through Durban or Dar es Salaam, where a single turnaround typically stretched to six weeks.

Angola, the DRC, and Zambia have positioned the corridor as a flagship, with financial and political backing from the United States, Italy, the European Union, and a coalition of multilateral financiers under the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and the EU’s Global Gateway. The goal is to create an alternative westward route for copper and cobalt exports, reducing dependence on longer paths through South African and East African ports, lowering transport times, and de-risking supply for battery and clean-energy manufacturers.

Seen from within the continent, though, Lobito matters for another reason.

It shows how a corridor can become the organising unit of industrial strategy, because the infrastructure that moves ore and the systems that govern its movement naturally operate beyond national borders. It also forces a more fundamental question onto the table: if the next generation of global industry is going to draw on Africa’s critical minerals, what scale of planning can genuinely support that opportunity? In practice, the geology is regional, but industrial policy is still national. Lobito exposes that mismatch and demonstrates how coordinated corridors can begin to bridge it.

Africa holds close to a third of the world’s known reserves of future-facing minerals. These include the metals driving the global energy transition – copper, cobalt, manganese, graphite, nickel, lithium and the platinum group metals – as well as a broader suite of inputs used in advanced manufacturing and emerging digital technologies, from rare earth elements to titanium and vanadium. But they are dispersed: copper and cobalt across the Central African Copperbelt; lithium, nickel and graphite across Southern Africa; manganese and PGMs across South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe; bauxite concentrated in Guinea; and rare earth prospects emerging through Namibia and parts of East Africa.

With the IEA projecting sharply higher demand for key battery metals and transition-linked commodities over the next two to three decades, Africa’s mineral endowment places it at the centre of an emerging geopolitical and industrial reordering.

This makes the case for regional thinking almost self-evident, at least one would think.

But many continental strategies blur the distinction between regional cooperation and regional approaches to beneficiation. Regional cooperation is about how states organise the rules of the game across borders. It includes tariff alignment, customs procedures, rail and port concessions, environmental and social standards, power-pool governance, dispute-resolution mechanisms and the regulatory treatment of long-term PPPs. Regional beneficiation, by contrast, is about where along the value chain different activities sit and how those activities are sequenced. Ore can be crushed, concentrated, smelted, refined, turned into precursors, assembled into components and eventually integrated into finished products. Some of these steps require substantial power and water; some are knowledge-intensive; some are highly trade-exposed and shaped by logistics costs. It seldom makes sense to duplicate each step in every country that hosts a deposit. It is more efficient to map which segments of a copper-cobalt-manganese-lithium chain should sit in which locations along a corridor, then design fiscal regimes, power investments, and skills programmes accordingly.

The continental policy landscape is beginning to move in this direction. The African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy positions critical minerals as a regional industrialisation opportunity and promotes integrated value chains and corridor-based infrastructure planning. The Regional Economic Communities – SADC, COMESA, ECCAS and others – provide sub-continental platforms that could support this kind of coordination, although their mining and industrial frameworks are uneven. Nonetheless, they offer the institutional footing on which more deliberate regional planning can be built.

In practice, turning these frameworks into functioning corridors requires a different discipline from governments. It means treating a corridor as a single planning unit for power, water, data connectivity and skills, even while it traverses several jurisdictions. It means aligning fiscal terms enough to prevent destructive competition for smelters and refineries, while allowing differentiated incentives where countries have distinct industrial strengths. It also demands joint approaches to environmental and social governance, so that high standards become a feature of the corridor rather than a source of regulatory arbitrage. These elements form the operational foundation on which regional value-chain design can take shape.

The private sector sits at the centre of whether this works. Mining companies and their supply chains will not commit to multi-decade smelting or refining investments unless they see predictable corridor-wide frameworks on transport, power pricing, fiscal regimes and environmental standards. Battery and EV manufacturers will only treat African corridors as strategic production nodes if they can access sufficient scale, consistent quality and credible delivery timelines. Regional banks and DFIs will structure project finance and corporate facilities more confidently when risk is shared across a corridor with pooled revenue streams rather than tied to the fiscal position of a single sovereign.

Africa does not have the luxury of treating regional cooperation and regional beneficiation as afterthoughts.

If the continent continues to negotiate in small, fragmented units, the result will be a patchwork of export restrictions and incentive schemes that strain investor confidence without building the connective tissue of shared infrastructure and industrial capacity. If, instead, leaders use projects such as the Lobito Corridor as prototypes for how to align geology, logistics, and industrial policy at a regional scale, the continent can begin to shape global value chains rather than simply feeding into them.