Africa has 658 critical minerals projects — and four out of five still produce nothing

An EY mapping shows the number of critical minerals projects on the continent growing 36% in just over a year, while production advances only 11% — the picture of a bottleneck separating discovery from a mine in operation.

Consultancy EY mapped Africa's critical minerals project pipeline across eight commodities — bauxite, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel and platinum — and counted 658 active projects, up from 483 in the first quarter of 2025, a 36% increase. But that expansion isn't uniform across the funnel: 198 projects are in exploration (up 82%), 129 in development (up 70%), and only 288 are already producing (up 11%). Of the 32 projects added since the start of 2026 alone, 27 are lithium, spread across 13 countries, with Zimbabwe and Nigeria standing out — and 25 of those 27 haven't left the exploration phase. EY senior infrastructure advisory consultant Gaël Tanguy summed up the picture: Africa is preparing tomorrow's supply, but it still can't respond at today's pace of global demand.

The most important data point here isn't the pipeline's growth — it's how it grows. A mining project moves through stages with very different risks and timelines: exploration is drilling and sampling, still without any guarantee an economically viable deposit exists; development is engineering, permitting and capital raising; production is a mine actually operating and generating revenue. When exploration grows 82% and production grows only 11%, it means the funnel is filling at the entrance far faster than it's emptying at the exit — and the structural reason is that the gap between discovery and production on the continent takes 15 to 17 years, a timeline no investment announcement can compress by decree. Lithium illustrates this on a smaller scale: of 27 new projects, 25 remain in exploration, which means today's market enthusiasm for African lithium is, in practice, a bet on deposits not yet confirmed as viable, not a source of supply available in the short term. At the same time, the share of projects under state control in the Democratic Republic of Congo rose from 39% to 48% in just over a year — a parallel move by governments to reduce dependence on foreign operators precisely at the stage where more projects stop being pure exploration and start requiring infrastructure, energy and long-term capital.

For anyone planning a critical minerals supply chain — from a battery maker to a government designing industrial policy — Africa's pipeline is both a promise and a warning. The promise is real volume of resources entering the investment radar. The warning is that counting announced projects as if they were guaranteed future production tonnes is a recurring mistake for anyone reading mining news without understanding the funnel: between a lithium project announced in Zimbabwe today and the first tonne exported, more than a decade can pass, and most never get there. Understanding that distance between exploration, development and production is what separates a naive read of the market from one that knows where the real risk is concentrated.