GRID-AFRICA - Governance, resilience, infrastructure, and digital transition in Africa

The digital landscape in Africa is undergoing a major transformation. Initiatives such as the African Union (AU) Digital Transformation Strategy, the Digital Trade Protocol under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and the AU Data Policy Framework demonstrate a clear commitment to utilising digital transformation to promote job creation, diversify exports, and advance regional integration. Yet, mobilising resources and capabilities to achieve these goals remain a major challenge unfolding within an increasingly competitive global environment.

A core premise is that digital infrastructure and critical minerals are mutually constitutive. Demand for minerals is propelled by the expansion of data centres, fibre networks, mobile equipment, and power systems. At the same time, digitalisation influences how mineral value chains operate, how rents are distributed, and which upgrading paths are feasible. This project, therefore, examines a digital-mineral feedback loop linking extraction, processing, and manufacturing to connectivity, data, and governance, highlighting the proactive role of African actors in shaping, negotiating, and contesting the terms and conditions of these arrangements.

The GRID-AFRICA project is organised around two main pillars - digital infrastructure and critical minerals. While the prospect of independent, resilient, and highly functional digital infrastructures is politically appealing, the funding, construction, operation, maintenance, and governance of transnational digital infrastructures at massive scales raise complex political, economic, technical, and societal challenges that remain largely unresolved. If the goal is to develop robust digital connectivity infrastructures beyond basic internet access, substantial investments are required in high-capacity fibre-optic corridors, data centres, next-generation mobile standards, resilient electricity networks, and secure digital payment rails. Amid competing governance and financing models advanced by multiple external partners, the project maps infrastructural pathways and explores mechanisms for mutual benefit, reciprocal learning, and coordinated standards.

Demand for critical minerals such as copper, cobalt, and nickel is surging, and Africa is at the forefront. Its mineral wealth represents approximately 30% of global critical mineral reserves, including 70% of cobalt production via the Democratic Republic of Congo and 80% of platinum reserves concentrated in South Africa. International development organisations have been touting promising futures for African countries while simultaneously perpetuating narratives of the resource curse. Africa’s mineral wealth thus represents not only extraction potential but also a critical site of contestation over value creation, sovereignty, and industrialisation. The key issue is conversion: how can global demand for the critical minerals underpinning digitalisation be translated into structural upgrading across exploration, processing, manufacturing, and services? Against this backdrop, the project investigates how the renewed quest for African critical minerals, amid great-power rivalry, geological uncertainty, and technological change, reshapes African bargaining power, risk exposure, and policy space.

The project asks a straightforward question (1) that has clear policy implications (2):

1. How do the physical and regulatory transformations of African digital infrastructure and their upstream critical-mineral supply chains reconfigure African states and their position in the world economy?
2. Which institutional and policy mechanisms enhance African agency in shaping the rules and outcomes of digital and mineral engagement with external actors?

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