The cost-benefit question matter before introducing an export ban or restriction, governments should do a cost-benefit analysis and ask questions like: What will we gain and what will it cost?
This question is sometimes missing from beneficiation debates.
A 2025 study by the Natural Resource Governance Institute, for example, highlighted the economic challenges Ghana could face if it pursues domestic lithium processing under current conditions, including high capital costs, limited feedstock and limited refining expertise.
These factors can significantly affect whether domestic processing is commercially viable.
The IEA's findings reinforce this point.
New refining projects outside established dominant suppliers can face capital costs that are 20 per cent to more than 150 per cent higher, while operating costs are, on average, around 50 per cent higher.
Infrastructure gaps, skills shortages and lengthy permitting processes add further difficulties.
These are not reasons for African countries to abandon value addition and beneficiation strategies but rather to inform how governments should design them.
Zimbabwe provides a useful example.
The government has pushed mining companies towards greater processing and increasingly expects companies to address their own energy requirements.
But if a company must generate its own electricity because the national grid cannot reliably supply it, the economics of beneficiation change considerably.
The same applies when governments expect companies to process material from other producers.
If Zimbabwe wants a central lithium chemical-processing facility capable of taking feedstock from several mines, that may make more economic sense than requiring every company to build its own facility.
But such arrangements need to be negotiated clearly in advance and ensure that state support in establishing the commercial, regulatory and infrastructure framework necessary to make shared processing viable.
Beneficiation should not stop at the border
This is where I think the African beneficiation debate needs to become more nuanced. In our understandable pursuit of domestic value addition, we sometimes frame beneficiation too narrowly around national borders where policy makers want processing, refining and smelting to be mined within national borders.
But for a continent seeking to industrialise, the more important questions should sometimes be around how we leverage on regional competitive and comparative advantages to build capacities to move up the value chain.?
Africa does not need every country to build every part of a mineral value chain. Instead, countries should leverage their different competitive and comparative advantages to build regional value chains.
Lithium mined in Zimbabwe, for example, could be processed further in South Africa for example where the necessary infrastructure, technical capabilities and industrial ecosystem already exist.
Additionally, Zambia could potentially serve as a regional copper-processing hub, with neighbouring countries contributing feedstock and benefiting from the infrastructure and markets that emerge around it.
Other regional hubs could similarly specialise in processing, refining or smelting particular minerals, allowing countries to pool resources and build economies of scale.
This is precisely where regional economic integration becomes important.
Yet, in practice, national interests and nationalist approaches to industrial policy often trump regional economic integration. Even within SADC, where regional integration is an explicit policy objective, governments have not always created the policy environment necessary for businesses to operate across borders and build integrated regional value chains.
Governments often compete for the same investments, seek to establish similar processing facilities and prioritise domestic ownership and production even where a regional approach could produce greater economic value.
If every country insists that minerals must be processed domestically before they can cross its borders, we risk fragmenting the very regional value chains that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and regional economic communities such as SADC are trying to develop.
Zimbabwe's platinum sector illustrates the challenge.
Since 2013, Zimbabwe has been pushing platinum producers to establish refining capacity locally.
However, platinum mining companies such as Mimosa Mining Company owned by Impala Platinum Holdings, Unki Mine Valterra Platinum (formerly Anglo-American Platinum) have consistently pointed to the existing PGM refining infrastructure technical expertise and accumulated investment in South Africa.
While plausible, I do not think the answer is simply to accept the companies' position and abandon Zimbabwe's beneficiation ambitions.
But neither should Zimbabwe design its beneficiation policy as though South Africa does not exist.
If South Africa already has economically viable platinum-refining capacity, Zimbabwe could use that capacity as part of a regional platinum value chain, while simultaneously developing additional capabilities at home.
Airbus offers a particularly instructive example.
Its origins can be traced to a 1967 agreement between the French, German and British governments to deepen cooperation in aviation technology and develop the capacity to compete with American manufacturers such as Boeing.
Rather than each country attempting to build a globally competitive aerospace industry independently, the participating states pooled capabilities, capital, technology and markets across borders.
The result was a regional industrial ecosystem in which different countries could specialise in different stages of production while collectively building a globally competitive European industry.
Africa can apply a similar logic to critical minerals.
The objective of beneficiation should not necessarily be to ensure that every stage of mineral processing takes place within the borders of the country where extraction occurs.
A blanket export restriction that prevents minerals from moving to a neighbouring African country that already possesses the capacity to process, refine or smelt them could, in fact, undermine regional industrialisation.
It may protect one country's processing ambitions in the short term while preventing the emergence of a larger, more competitive regional value chain.
This approach may require governments to compromise on the idea that every mineral must be fully processed domestically
The more strategic approach is, therefore, to ask not only where a mineral is extracted, but where across the region different stages of the value chain can be performed most efficiently and competitively.
One country may have the mineral reserves, another may have relatively cheap and reliable energy, another may possess established processing or refining capacity, while another may have the infrastructure, skills or manufacturing base necessary for downstream production
Regional integration can allow these comparative advantages to be combined rather than duplicated.
Policy makers, therefore, need to distinguish between restricting the export of raw minerals out of Africa and restricting the movement of minerals within Africa.
Currently, this is missing in most critical minerals export restrictions and beneficiation policies.
The better approach is not easy but demands that policy makers in mining ministries, trade and industry, finance understand the economics of each mineral and invest alongside the private sector, negotiate smarter investment agreements to leverage regional comparative advantages.
The writer is a Senior Research Fellow of the Africa-China Centre for Policy and Advisory (Zimbabwe)
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