Africa holds the minerals that power the clean energy future. But the communities living on top of those riches are getting sicker, poorer, and increasingly invisible. Something must change.
Watching the river your grandmother bathed in turn brown; waking to the sound of machinery and the smell of chemicals every morning; and knowing that the ore, blasted from the earth beneath your feet, is destined for the battery of an electric vehicle sold for tens of thousands of pounds in Europe or North America. You receive nothing.
What the world calls progress is experienced here as contaminated water and children getting sick. This is the daily reality for hundreds of thousands of people living in the mining communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
This article examines how the global energy transition, framed as humanity’s great moral project, is in practice reproducing the same extractive patterns that have impoverished Africa for generations.
Getty Images (via ResourceGovernance.org)
Shaping the Energy Transition
The push away from fossil fuels has become one of the defining policy shifts of the 21st century. Electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines are not made of air and ambition. They require vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, and nickel. The majority of these minerals sit beneath African soil.
This demand was already growing sharply before geopolitical shock increased it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a Europe-wide energy panic, forcing governments to accelerate renewable infrastructure at a pace never previously attempted. The United States responded by directing $369 billion towards clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union formally designated cobalt and lithium as strategic resources. China, meanwhile, had spent a decade quietly securing upstream mineral assets across Africa through state-backed investments.
Suddenly, African minerals were not merely commodities; they were instruments of geopolitical power. And when powerful nations urgently need something you have, the nature of the negotiation changes entirely. The question, then, is are African governments using the leverage this shift provides?
A new geopolitical dynamic means the energy transition is not just an environmental project. It is a strategic competition between the world’s most powerful economies; but it is fought largely on African soil, and with African communities bearing the cost.
The scale of this imbalance is clear in the data.
70% of global cobalt reserves sit in the DRC, yet its mining communities rank among the most impoverished on earth.
56% of women interviewed near DRC cobalt mines reported a significant rise in gynaecological and reproductive problems since mining began.
36/100 is the DRC’s mining governance score in the 2021 Resource Governance Index, reflecting systemic failures in transparency and revenue management.
Is a Just Transition possible?
Bad outcomes are not inevitable. It is important to recognise that they are simply the product of bad deals. The evidence on this is clear, and the contrast between Botswana and the DRC provides an apt example.
Botswana sits on diamonds, not cobalt, but the principle holds. From the outset, the government negotiated a genuine 50/50 equity partnership with De Beers through the Debswana joint venture, with legally binding reinvestment mandates directing proceeds into healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Over several decades, Botswana transformed from one of Africa’s poorest countries into a middle-income economy with functioning public services. The minerals did not do that. The terms of the deal did.
The DRC tells a different story. Research by Provenzano and Bull (2021) analysed satellite imagery of over 1,650 mineral deposits across Africa spanning four decades and found strong evidence of what economists call the political resource curse: in non-democratic settings, mining tends to accelerate conflict and deliver only temporary, shallow economic gains that collapse when the mine closes. The DRC’s mining sector contributes over 20 per cent of GDP, yet the country ranks 176th out of 193 nations on the Human Development Index. That gap between mineral wealth and human welfare is not accidental. It is structural.
Sikwe Scarter
Part of the problem is fiscal. The Natural Resource Governance Institute’s 2021 Resource Governance Index found that the DRC’s mining revenue management is fundamentally deficient, lacking consolidated public reporting on reserves, production, and exports. Transfer pricing arrangements, whereby multinational subsidiaries shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions through internal transactions, erode the taxable base. Communities receive no royalties. They are not shareholders. In the precise economic sense, they are bearing what economists call an externality: a cost generated by a transaction they were never party to. All for the benefit of consumers thousands of miles away.
There are signs of resistance. In 2022, Zambia’s new government moved to renegotiate mining royalty agreements it deemed structurally unfair. In 2023, Zimbabwe implemented an export ban on raw lithium ore, seeking to force investment in domestic processing rather than simply shipping raw material abroad. Both moves drew fierce pushback from foreign investors. But both were grounded in sound logic: when the United States, China, and the European Union are all competing urgently for the same deposits, the threat that investment will simply pack up and leave is far less credible than it once was.
The Cobalt Fields of Lualaba
“The water we used to drink from the river is now brown. Our children are sick. We were never asked if we agreed to this.” Community member, Lualaba Province, DRC (RAID/AFREWATCH Investigation, 2024)
RAID-UK.org
Lualaba Province in southern DRC is the heart of the global cobalt industry. For the women who live there, this is a public health emergency.
A landmark 2020 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health by Van Brusselen et al., conducted across 133,662 births in Lubumbashi, found that fathers working in mining-related jobs and mothers exposed to the surrounding environment faced a significantly higher risk of birth defects in their children. The researchers documented that widespread environmental contamination from cobalt and copper mining had produced the conditions for a reproductive health crisis. The African Copperbelt, straddling the DRC and Zambia, is identified by the study as one of the ten most polluted areas on earth.
These findings were corroborated on the ground. A 19-month investigation by UK human rights group RAID and DRC-based NGO AFREWATCH, published in March 2024, interviewed 144 residents across 25 villages adjacent to five of the world’s largest cobalt and copper mines. The findings were stark: 56 per cent of respondents reported a significant increase in gynaecological and reproductive health problems among women since industrial mining began, including irregular menstruation, urogenital infections, more frequent miscarriages, and in some cases birth defects. Rivers and groundwater near the mines showed acidic industrial pollution. Local paediatricians reported that rates of genital infections and skin pathologies among female patients had, in their words, “exploded.”
A complete absence of accountability makes these medical problems truly unconscionable. When mines operate in Germany, Canada, or Australia, communities can sue. Regulators can revoke permits. Politicians face electoral consequences. In Lualaba, these mechanisms are either absent or captured by the same interests that profit from extraction. The legal framework for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), enshrined in ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, has not been ratified by most African producer nations. Consent processes are consultative. Communities are asked for their views. They are rarely given a veto.
Nathanaël Desmeules
Options for a Just Transition
It is clear the renewable energy transition is not optional. Climate science is conclusive, and the costs of inaction are catastrophic, but necessity does not justify negligence. A transition that reduces emissions in Europe and North America while magnifying environmental and human costs in African communities is not sustainable. It is a redistribution of harm.
What this analysis demonstrates is that the current outcome is not an unavoidable by-product of global demand, but the result of weak governance, asymmetrical bargaining power, and unenforced standards across the supply chain. Where institutions are strong and contracts are deliberate, mineral wealth has translated into public value. Where they are not, it has entrenched inequality and accelerated environmental decline. The difference is political, not geological.
There is a tendency among investors and policymakers to frame stricter regulation as a threat to supply. That argument is increasingly outdated. Demand for cobalt, lithium, and copper is no longer speculative; it is structurally locked in by industrial policy commitments across the United States, the European Union, and China. This shifts leverage toward producer nations, provided it is exercised collectively and strategically.
Three interventions are both necessary and immediately actionable:
- Supply chain accountability must move beyond voluntary ESG frameworks into binding legal obligations. This requires legislation in consumer markets that imposes due diligence requirements on battery manufacturers and electric vehicle producers, with enforceable penalties for environmental damage and human rights violations at the point of extraction. Liability must extend upstream, not stop at the factory gate.
- Community consent must be redefined from consultation to enforceable participation. This means embedding Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) into domestic law with clear veto mechanisms, independent oversight bodies, and accessible legal recourse for affected communities. Without enforceability, consent remains procedural rather than substantive.
- Value retention within producer countries must be prioritised through coordinated industrial policy. Export bans on raw minerals, such as Zimbabwe’s lithium restrictions, are only effective if paired with investment in local processing capacity, regional value chains, and infrastructure. Fragmented national approaches will struggle; alignment through frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area offers a more credible path to negotiating power and scale.
None of these measures are theoretical. They are already being tested in different forms across jurisdictions. The issue is not feasibility, but political will and coordination.
Lachlan (Unsplash)
Call for a Just Transition
The global energy transition will define the next century of economic development. The question is whether it will also reproduce the inequities of the last. Africa’s role in this transition is indispensable. Ensuring that its communities are not treated as expendable is not a matter of charity or corporate goodwill. It is a matter of governance, enforcement, and choice.
A just transition is not a slogan. It is a set of decisions. And those decisions are overdue.
Activists Without Borders calls on governments, corporations, and citizens to demand a just transition. Push for binding supply chain accountability, genuine community consent, and equitable mineral revenue. Africa’s communities cannot wait.
