The season for north-south comparisons and complaints is over; now is the opportune moment for African leaders to wake up to a new dawn of science diplomacy and work with African experts to deliver tangible accomplishments worthy of a young and mineral-rich continent.

Key message at the 4^th Africa Colloquium: DAAD Alumni Week, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, 3 – 6 June 2025

CEMEREM, one of the DAAD-funded Centres of Excellence in Africa, was well represented at the DAAD Alumni Week held at TU Bergakademie Freiberg from 3rd to 6th June 2025.

Africa’s vast but largely untapped mineral reserves, estimated at more than a third of the global total, position the continent at the forefront of the global energy transition, geopolitical interests, and mineral-driven industrialisation and growth trajectory. The long list of minerals in Africa holding out the highest promise as critical elements for renewable energy and battery storage technologies, as well as advanced communications and consumer electronics, includes lithium, cobalt, copper, graphite, aluminium, platinum, niobium, rubidium, tantalum, tin, manganese, nickel, palladium, and rare earth elements. The Africa Green Minerals Strategy hinges on Africa’s comparative advantage in the reserves of energy transition minerals. Yet, the mining sector’s potential to drive Africa’s development is constrained by governance gaps and problems interwoven in a complex mining-environment-society web. Intellectuals have referred to this province of complex, non-linear difficulties that resist simple or exact solutions as a “wicked problem” replete with a “web of reciprocal causality”. Thanks to a recent public-facing dialogue by African experts in Germany, a simplified version of this discourse can be voiced in the rest of this article.

Weak policy frameworks, corruption, a chronic lack of transparency and robust accountability mechanisms, and fragmented decision-making in silos without a unifying decision support system hinder the achievement of sound mineral resource governance. As a result, the social and economic motivation of the Africa Mining Vision (AMV) to ensure knowledge-driven planning in Africa’s mining sector for “broad-based sustainable growth and socioeconomic development” with equity, transparency, and optimal exploitation of the minerals has remained in limbo. A journey through the mining law reforms in Africa also lays bare this unsettling truth.

Despite mining-related regulatory reforms since the 1980s, well documented by Campbell, little has changed for the better in Africa’s mining sector. There are many cases of varying and deepening degrees of degradation, disenfranchisement, deprivation, deformity, and death, which leave host communities and ecosystems in mining areas highly exposed to hazards and vulnerable. The long range of regulatory reforms began in the 1980s with liberalisation and deregulation to attract foreign investments, exemplified by Ghana, followed by privatisation and provisions for environmental responsibility in the mid-1990s, with examples from Zambia and Guinea. Later, in the late 1990s, a revisit of the role of the state through facilitation and re-regulation was expressed in regulating royalties and taxation to help encourage mineral exports, with examples from Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mali, and Madagascar. In 2016, Kenya enacted a new mining law, qualifying as Africa’s modern archetype of regulatory reforms in the mining sector with a keen focus on enhancing predictability and transparency in mineral resource governance. What is the matter, then?

The central thesis is that to unlock the huge promise of Africa’s mineral wealth, parametric decision support for sound resource governance is indispensable, for which science, technology, and quality data — mainly geodata — is of overarching importance. To confront these governance gaps, an African experts forum held on 5^th June 2025 at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany’s and the world’s oldest university of mining, stressed the point that Africans are indeed capable of transforming mining sector outcomes. However, there must first be an intentional revolution that marries political goodwill with expert advice by the very African experts, both at home and abroad, complete with science diplomacy in managing international partnerships and incentives for a new governance and economic model thriving on knowledge-driven Pan-African ideals. Most importantly, the season for north-south comparisons and complaints is over; now is the opportune moment for African leaders to wake up to a new dawn of science diplomacy and work with African experts to deliver tangible accomplishments worthy of a young and mineral-rich continent. With its massive pool of young talents, Africa can ride the wave of technological innovations to leapfrog the structural barriers and long routes that older regions have had to scale.

At the forum, the myriad challenges characterising Africa’s mining sector made for an ideal laboratory for advancing a systems-thinking approach. Pioneered by Professor Jay Forrester and championed further by the century’s systems thinkers such as Barry Richmond, Peter Senge, and John Sterman, a systems approach, hence system dynamics, is critical to navigating the interconnected and non-linear problems bedevilling mining sector governance. Unlike the traditional, project-focused approach that routinely applies operations research, systems thinking first captures the broader ecosystem, considering spatial characteristics and economic, social and environmental causal loops that transcend geographical regions and multiple sectors.

A key example from Kenya was not lacking. Reference was made to recent research at TU Bergakademie Freiberg that led to the development of Africa’s first integrated and spatially enabled decision support model for mining sector planning at a strategic, regional, and multisector scale with active stakeholder engagement. Branded the Taita-Taveta Integrated Mine Planning Model (TIMPM), the model used Taita Taveta County as a case study, a vast and diverse district in Kenya that is rich in gemstones, iron ore, and industrial minerals.

TIMPM, a scalable and adaptable prototype, intends to cure the siloed approach that has been focusing on optimising individual mining projects rather than multiple projects in a whole-systems approach that explores the big picture with broader regional or multisector aspects and impacts. TIMPM enables decision makers to simulate long-term mining strategies and policies that consider regional and multisector impacts. By providing evidence-based insights, the model fosters transparency, assesses impacts of assumed scenarios, and supports multistakeholder collaboration with a strong alignment with sustainable development imperatives. For example, TIMPM can be used to anticipate unintended consequences and assess how mining projects affect local communities, water resources, forests, agriculture, or biodiversity conservation, thus enabling decision makers to balance economic gains with social and environmental justice. This comprehensive systems approach addresses the intricacies of the mining sector governance challenges. It enables equitable resource-use planning, promotes inclusive multi-stakeholder engagement, and guides the strategic design of projects and programmes that reconcile competing and conflicting mining and land-based interests while cultivating synergies and long-term sustainability.

The aspirations of Africa’s Agenda 2063 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which lay emphasis on inclusive growth and environmental stewardship, should thrive with such holistic decision-making tools. Such holistic multicriteria tools integrate geospatial data with environmental and socioeconomic data and information to achieve transparency and inclusivity while promoting data-driven policy development, which is a parametric policymaking approach capable of securing more objectivity than the usual boardroom approach.

With African thought leaders driving these exemplary knowledge-led initiatives, fresh hopes for accomplishing the elusive and unfinished work of decolonising Africa’s resource management and economic empowerment models emerge. For Africa’s attention-grabbing mining sector, this change of tack and mindset should help retain a rising share of the mineral raw materials and their value addition on the continent, complete with mining business models that encourage vibrant forward and backward linkages and vertical integration for greater economic inclusion, technology transfer, skills development, and value creation for local miners and investors. Achieving this outcome over the next decade will require sustained infrastructure spending to support local value addition, regional market integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), a predictable regulatory environment, and aggressive capacity-building in research and higher education (both at TVETs and universities).

Further Resources:

• CNBC Africa panel discussion: https://www.cnbcafrica.com/media/6373907733112/driving-sustainability-in-africa-nature-restoration-carbon-markets-responsible-mining-/

• TU Bergakademie Freiberg colloquium recording: https://video.tu-freiberg.de/m/538ad6374a052d957692ccc5a99ea342e13e26c43315591edaeb7fa9e3e52b2a31c45a68e572ad8a21ca1aa365347eab8c53750b951720a85cdc8f6298de1b78

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Lecturer, Enactus Patron Nashon Adero Taita Taveta University More blogs from this author

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