At the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali this May, President Bola Tinubu asked a simple question: ‘Why not start an exchange commodity platform where we [African countries] can trade with one another?’ His rhetorical question received widespread applause from the audience. Moderator Zeinab Badawi posed the key question: why don’t you start one? The President offered no real response. The gap between political will and implementation is the focus of this article.
Disciplined execution and a carefully sequenced, incremental approach could go a long way to closing this gap, while also creating more immediate opportunities to realise a Pan-African Continental Commodity Exchange.
The diagnosis and the stakes
Sub-Saharan Africa holds approximately thirty per cent of the world’s proven critical-mineral reserves. This includes close to eighty per cent of platinum-group metals, some sixty-two per cent of chromium, more than a third of manganese and roughly half the planet’s cobalt. The International Energy Agency projects that the market value of key energy-transition minerals will more than double by 2040, to around 770 billion US dollars, under its Net Zero scenario.
Even these figures understate the endowment because much of the continent remains under-explored. At a recent African ministerial meeting on critical minerals, Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, noted that only ten percent of his country has been geologically surveyed, and yet that fraction alone has already yielded forty-four different minerals. If just on tenth of a country contains such abundance, the remaining ninety per cent, much of it still unexplored, holds extraordinary potential. Nigeria is not an exception: across Africa, most countries remain similarly underexplored, and some considerably more so.
Yet, Africa captures little of its known endowment. The diagnosis by President Tinubu is correct: the continent sells ore and, with it, its potential value. The spodumene exported from Zimbabwe is worth five to seven times less than the lithium hydroxide it becomes once refined abroad. Congolese cobalt largely departs as concentrate. Africa remains a price-taker in markets whose benchmarks are fixed in London and Shanghai. Its countries trade remarkably little among themselves: intra-African trade stands at between twelve and eighteen per cent of the total, against far higher shares within Europe and Asia.
A continental commodity exchange may be the beginning of addressing these deficiencies.
Its essential function is to discover a price that buyers and sellers trust. Around this cluster are the supporting mechanisms of common grading standards, certified warehousing, guaranteed settlement and the instruments that permit producers to hedge and to borrow against stored inventory. For the smallholder cooperative, the woman-owned trading firm or the local processor, a warehouse receipt is often the first bankable collateral it possesses. Viewed this way, an exchange is less a trading platform than an ecosystem: one that widens access to finance, stimulates local value addition and industrialisation, and creates the conditions in which African firms can compete, grow and create jobs. The vision is sound. The challenge has always been how to realise it.
Fortunately, widespread lessons from across the continent provide encouraging signs for a possible pan-African commodity exchange.
What the record teaches
State-led and private-led models have been tested across Africa, and each yields a distinct lesson. The encouraging state-led case is Ethiopia, whose Commodity Exchange, established in 2008, transformed the coffee and sesame trade. Volumes rose from around 138,000 tonnes in its first year to more than 500,000 by its third, and the exchange came to serve millions of smallholders through farmer cooperatives. Its success stems from three conditions: determined state backing, capable institutional leadership and a design fitted to the commodity itself. The cautionary state-led case is Nigeria. Its Commodity Exchange has existed since 2006 but has struggled throughout to generate volume. The mandate was sufficient, but liquidity and trust were not.
The private-led record points the other way. AFEX, Nigeria’s first private-sector-led exchange, began trading in 2014, built a functioning warehouse-receipt system and expanded into Kenya and Uganda. The London Metal Exchange completes the picture: it sets the world’s base-metal prices not by virtue of any treaty, but because it rests upon some 465 warehouses and decades of accumulated liquidity. The lessons converge. The state is indispensable for mandate, standards and trust; the private sector is indispensable for liquidity and commercial discipline.
Which minerals? And in what order?
The question is which commodities can build trust, liquidity and strategic value fast enough to make a continental exchange credible. Countries may have different perspectives based on context, mineral endowment and geopolitical as well as socio-economic conditions.
The question is which commodities can build trust, liquidity and strategic value fast enough to make a continental exchange credible
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Gold makes the most compelling point of entry. It is the most liquid and intensely traded of Africa’s minerals, with a high value-to-weight ratio and an established global benchmark against which an African price can be referenced. It also presents the most urgent governance case. In the Sahel, gold has become a source of contestation and instability. Burkina Faso alone produced a record ninety-four tonnes in 2025, contributing over four billion dollars to its economy and some seven per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Yet substantial quantities are smuggled through networks that finance insurgent and extremist groups. Illegally mined metal is blended into formal production before export to refineries beyond the continent, where its origin is lost. The Sahel now accounts for fifty-one per cent of the world’s terrorism deaths. A regulated exchange, supported by certified assaying and traceable warehouse receipts, would help to formalise commodity flows that currently fund violence. It would also widen the revenue base of fragile states, transforming a driver of instability into a source of legitimate value, making it an instrument of security policy as much as of trade.
Copper supplies the industrial spine. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia together mine roughly a sixth of the world’s copper – the DRC some 3.3 million tonnes in 2024, Zambia a record 890,000 the following year. Beyond current output lie substantial untapped reserves, including Sudan’s copper belts, and the strategic course is to pace new exploration and extraction to the growth of African processing capacity, rather than simply to export more ore. Demand is rising as electric vehicles use between two-and-a-half and four times more copper than conventional cars, while the expansion of electricity grids, renewables and data centres continues to drive consumption. Copper concentrate commonly contains gold, silver and iron, which can be monetised. A copper contract anchored in the Copperbelt would have the potential to achieve immediate market depth and attract global attention.
The enabling architecture, and what it will take
Much of the necessary infrastructure is more advanced than commonly supposed. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) furnishes a single-market legal framework across 1.4 billion people; the World Bank estimates it could raise the continent’s income by 450 billion dollars and increase intra-African exports by eighty-one per cent by 2035. Those gains will be materialised only if investment in African institutions is matched by investment in African firms, equipping small and medium enterprises (SMEs), cooperatives and processors to participate in and compete through them. More consequential, and less remarked, is the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS): live, endorsed by the African Union, developed with Afreximbank and now connecting more than 160 banks for instant settlement in local currencies, with projected savings of some 5 billion dollars a year. President Tinubu’s expressions at the Africa CEO Forum is therefore no longer aspirational; the settlement layer exists and awaits an exchange to use it.
The obstacles, such as the reluctance to pool sovereignty, the difficulty of generating liquidity, thin physical infrastructure, the slow harmonisation of standards and the danger of governance capture, have proved insurmountable only when encountered in combination. A continental exchange should begin by securing a binding mandate through the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat. It should launch with gold to address both liquidity and fragmentation, settle transactions through PAPSS, expand to copper on the Copperbelt, build market depth through anchor participants and market-makers, and only then advance towards the battery metals and an African benchmark price that the wider world must reference.
A continental exchange should begin by securing a binding mandate through the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat
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Tinubu was right not to reject the idea of promoting a pan-African Commodity Exchange platform. However, a more useful set of questions, which Africa governments will benefit from, are more specific. Which mineral? Which corridor? Which warehouses? Which currency? And in which order? The continent can deliver its own development with the emergence of continental champions to lead Africa’s transformation.
The Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not express an institutional position
Dr Jide Martyns Okeke, is the Africa Regional Programme Director at the United Nations Development Programme
