Summary
- Africa has significant mineral resources, growing markets, available labour, industrial footholds and an increasingly integrated continental market. The central challenge is whether African governments can use these assets collectively and strategically to negotiate industrial capacity with external partners.
- China’s dominance of clean-energy manufacturing creates both a constraint and an opportunity. China has an exceptionally deep ecosystem spanning solar, batteries, electric vehicles and grid technologies, with dominance in mineral processing and battery-cell manufacturing.
- Rather than attempting to compete directly with China across entire value chains, the policy insight proposes strategic complementarity: African countries should identify specific segments where they can develop competitive capabilities and negotiate with Chinese firms and other external investors to locate manufacturing, assembly, supplier development and associated capabilities within African economies.
- China’s extensive energy-finance and infrastructure presence in Africa has generated power plants, transmission infrastructure and renewable energy projects, but has generally produced limited domestic manufacturing capability. The gap between resource extraction and domestic manufacturing is the central structural problem.
- Closing this gap requires an integrated industrial strategy built around six mutually reinforcing areas: ecosystem building; industrial clustering; supplier development; standards harmonisation; financing and procurement reform; and regional coordination.
