This year, we have seen a global portfolio reshuffle led by the majors, which exhibit a shift to exclusively tier-one assets. Other portfolio recalibrations speak of a preference for pure-play and the disintegration of highly diversified portfolios. So how does Africa fare in the global assessment of mining assets, and do negative narratives like high-profile disputes, as seen in Mali, narrow investors’ latitudes?

By way of endowment, discovery rate, and cost of discovery, Africa is simply unbeatable. However, a warped perception of the continent can cause investors to overlook opportunities. The value of assets may be marked down in capital terms, but their impact on the ground is outsized on a continent where mining serves as a main development tool. These are all covered in the first part of this report.

Looking at the different commodities painting Africa’s mining scene, record gold prices see juniors rushing toward the milestones that drive the biggest valuation jumps, while producers employ anti-cyclical strategies. For critical minerals like copper, cobalt, graphite, lithium, REEs, zinc, and nickel, interventionist tactics give rise to new fundamentals that overlay traditional supply and demand. The development of Africa’s biggest-ever mining project, Simandou, has broad-spanning implications on opening new logistical corridors for bulk commodity development in the continent. Coal mining is caught between contradicting pressures and indecisive policies, while uranium developers wait for a more incentivizing price to unlock investment. The value of natural diamonds, meanwhile, is being artificially pumped up through marketing, a tactic that may still not be enough in the competition with lab-grown stones.

These dynamics are also shaped by the political and economic contexts of each jurisdiction, as unpacked in Part 3 of this report: In West Africa, increased cross-regional transactions lead to the emergence of new hubs, such as Côte d’Ivoire, whereas neighbouring countries have been wrapped in a wave of recent coups d’état. The coup belt coincides with the most prolific gold belt on the continent, but there are new contenders, such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, offering untapped, capacious land for district-scale exploration.

Moving south, the continent’s once-leading jurisdiction, South Africa, has tough choices to make to arrest the downward trend in its smelting sector. Namibia, seen as a premier African jurisdiction, risks being read as overly premium as new fiscal rules are drafted, while Zambia has done everything right by international investors’ standards, to the extent that some locals see the current leader as “a president for foreigners, not Zambians.” In East Africa, Tanzania’s post-election unrest and the ensuing violent crackdown have stained the country’s reputation, while Malawi has the chance to expand from an agro-economy into a mining jurisdiction.

In the Supply Chain section, we look to the EPCs to better understand the transition to more complex mining deeper, lower-grade, polymetallic, refractory deposits, as well as secondary mining from tailings. For drilling and blasting contractors, it is all about location arbitrage to make the most of the current exploration and mining fever. Competition in the equipment space has moved well beyond products, to include local training, partnerships, financing and digital tools. The deregulation of energy markets and the growing uptake of PVs have given rise to new actors, freeing mines from dependence on a single utility.