By: Press Reader

Cent­ral Africa has entered a decis­ive phase in the global com­pet­i­tion for crit­ical min­er­als – one in which mar­ket access will increas­ingly be earned through three drivers: namely trace­ab­il­ity, form­al­isa­tion and bene­fi­ci­ation, rather than resource endow­ment alone, says data-driven crit­ical min­er­als strategy and trans­ac­tion advis­ory firm Strat­Mined Advis­ory dir­ector and senior min­ing strategy adviser Héra Mpondo.

Strat­Mined Advis­ory has a strong busi­ness focus on African min­ing value chains.

She explains that these drivers will be cru­cial in Cent­ral Africa’s crit­ical min­er­als boom dec­ade, while the form­al­isa­tion of artis­anal min­ing could be the biggest value uplift­ment for the Cent­ral and East African min­ing region.

Bring­ing artis­anal and small-scale min­ing (ASM) into formal, trace­able sup­ply chains rep­res­ents one of the “largest untapped value oppor­tun­it­ies in the region,” adds Mpondo.

In the Demo­cratic Repub­lic of Congo (DRC) alone, she says 1.5-mil­lion to 2-mil­lion artis­anal miners sup­port over 10-mil­lion depend­ants, pro­du­cing up to a third of national cobalt out­put, much of which is mined out­side formal chan­nels, thereby mean­ing it is both untaxed and untrace­able.

“Form­al­isa­tion is not a com­pli­ance exer­cise; it is an eco­nomic strategy,” says Mpondo, adding that elec­tric tag­ging, cooper­at­ive regis­tries and trace­able pay­ments can con­nect the smal­lest pro­du­cer to the most demand­ing bat­tery-grade mater­i­als buyer.

“Every tonne that moves from the informal to the formal eco­nomy is rev­enue for the State, bar­gain­ing power for com­munit­ies and derisked sup­ply for off­takers,” she adds, stress­ing that the same logic applies bey­ond cobalt.

Cameroon anchors much of Strat­Mined

Advis­ory’s recent work, which Mpondo sug­gests is Cent­ral Africa’s next min­ing fron­tier.

She points out that, in Cameroon, Strat­Mined Advis­ory’s ana­lysis doc­u­ments yearly losses of about $270-mil­lion on artis­anal gold alone – value that a trace­ab­il­ity mech­an­ism planned by Cameroon­ian national min­ing com­pany Société National des Mines (Sonam­ines) for 2026 to 2027, is designed to recap­ture.

The coun­try has the chance to build trace­ab­il­ity, local con­tent and bene­fi­ci­ation into its min­ing eco­nomy at the design stage, rather than ret­ro­fit­ting them later, which for investors seek­ing early pos­i­tions in Cent­ral Africa out­side the tra­di­tional Cop­per­belt, is a “rare win­dow”, explains Mpondo.

The DRC, which accounts for roughly three-quar­ters of global cobalt out­put, has fun­da­ment­ally reshaped the mar­ket since stra­tegic min­eral reg­u­lat­ory and con­trol agency the Author­ity for the Reg­u­la­tion and Con­trol of Stra­tegic Min­eral Sub­stance Mar­kets (ARECOMS) replaced its export sus­pen­sion with a quota regime cap­ping exports at 96 600 t/y for 2026 and 2027, says Mpondo.

“The con­ver­sa­tion in the DRC is no longer about how much cobalt leaves the coun­try, but about what each tonne can prove about itself,” she says.