Policy Brief – SADC Cooperation for a Just Energy Transition
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Photo taken by Moses Alex from PWYP Tanzania
The world needs Africa’s minerals. From lithium and cobalt to copper and manganese, Southern Africa holds the resources powering the global shift to clean energy. Yet, while the world rushes to secure these resources, over 100 million people across the region still live without electricity. Communities pay the price for extraction through environmental damage, displacement, and rights violations, while the wealth is exported elsewhere.
The extractivist model of exporting raw minerals has failed us. What we need now is bold, coordinated action to rewrite the rules and that starts with governments and institutions across the region stepping up: building value chains, advancing beneficiation, creating decent jobs, and ensuring our minerals power not just the world’s transition but our own.
The Just Minerals Africa campaign, a collaborative civil society campaign — works to ensure that the extraction of transition minerals in Africa advances human rights, protects the environment, and delivers tangible benefits to communities. As part of this effort, the campaign launched the SADC Strategic Minerals Governance Initiative, a regional platform to promote collective civil society advocacy for responsible mineral development, regional value addition, and green industrialisation. The initiative seeks to influence SADC-level policymaking by combining evidence-based advocacy with strategic communications, direct bilateral engagement with decision-makers, and coordinated action around key policy moments — including the upcoming SADC Summit, G20, and beyond.
At the core of this work is a new policy brief, which sets out concrete recommendations to guide regional decision-making on mineral governance. But impact at the regional level depends on national action. That’s why the initiative also calls on civil society actors across SADC countries to engage directly with their own governments to drive action and advance change from the ground up to shape a just minerals future that works for Africa, not just the world.
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