As UNGA Puts Africa’s Critical Minerals At The Centre Of The Global Development Debate, African Leaders And U.S. Investors Ask: Who Will Finance The Value Chain?

As world leaders gathered in New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations launched a new mechanism to help resource-rich developing countries capture more value from critical energy-transition minerals, another conversation was taking place just blocks away.

At The St. Regis, African political and economic leaders, investors, mining specialists, development-finance representatives and U.S. capital-markets professionals were confronting the same fundamental question from a different angle: Africa has many of the minerals the global economy needs. But where is the capital to build the industries that will allow Africa to capture the value?

That question defined the Africa Critical Minerals Investor Forum, held on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, on the margins of the 81st UN General Assembly.

The forum, themed “From Mine to Markets: Financing Africa’s Critical Minerals Through U.S. Capital,” brought together African leadership and international finance around an issue that has rapidly moved from a mining-sector conversation to a question of global economic strategy.

The timing was striking.

Earlier that day, at the UN Climate Summit, Secretary-General António Guterres announced the Country Support Mechanism on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, designed to help resource-rich developing countries build sustainable, responsible and resilient mineral value chains and ensure that greater benefits reach the people and nations where those resources originate. The first six partner countries are Guinea, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The UN has effectively put the question of who benefits from the global critical-minerals boom on the international agenda.

The New York investor forum asked the next question: How does Africa finance the transformation?

Africa’s position in the global critical-minerals economy is difficult to ignore.

The continent supplies approximately 75% of global manganese, 70% of cobalt and nearly 20% of copper, according to the International Energy Agency. Yet Africa captures less than 1% of the value generated from manufacturing clean-energy technologies and their components. That gap is becoming increasingly consequential.

Demand for the minerals underpinning batteries, electricity networks, renewable-energy systems and advanced technologies continues to grow, while global supply chains remain highly concentrated. The IEA reports that the average share of the top refining country across key energy minerals reached approximately 70% in 2025. The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether the world needs Africa’s minerals. It is whether Africa can turn that global dependence into industrial power at home.

That means moving beyond extraction into processing, refining, manufacturing, logistics, energy and technology, and developing African companies capable of competing for capital and markets

globally. It was this gap between resource ownership and value-chain ownership that sat at the heart of the September 23 discussion.

Opening the forum, Muazzam Mairawani, Founder & Group Chairman of MSM Group and Chairman of MSM Frontier Capital Acquisition Corporation, argued that Africa’s challenge is not a lack of investable opportunity. “Africa does not suffer from a shortage of opportunity. Africa suffers from a shortage of capital moving at the speed of opportunity.” His argument went directly to the question now confronting governments and investors: how can capital markets be structured to support projects large enough and long-term enough to transform natural-resource wealth into productive industries?

Through MSM Frontier Capital, Mairawani outlined an ambition to connect African opportunities with global institutional capital, strategic partners and development-finance institutions.