The Africa Finance Corporation is looking for investments in iron ore and uranium as it expands its reach in critical minerals, the institution’s head of mining and metals, Franklin Edochie, said on the sidelines of a mining conference in Cape Town. The Lagos based development finance institution already holds interests across gold, bauxite, copper and manganese in Africa, and now wants to add the two commodities where the continent’s undeveloped endowment is largest relative to current production.
Edochie’s iron ore case rests on West Africa. He said combined output from Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania and Sierra Leone could over the next ten years easily equate to a top three global iron ore producer in volume terms, a grouping that would challenge the Australia and Brazil duopoly as Guinea’s Simandou ramps up. On timing, he said the corporation is working towards financing those projects and hopes to announce something on uranium and iron ore investments within 6 to 12 months.
The AFC is also lead developer of the United States backed Lobito corridor, the rail project linking copper and cobalt mines in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola’s Atlantic port. That role explains the strategy: the institution invests where transport and power infrastructure decide whether a deposit is a mine or a stranded resource, and its own compendium values Africa’s mineral endowment at 29.5 trillion dollars, with about 8.6 trillion dollars still undeveloped. Iron ore and uranium are the two bulk stories in that undeveloped share, one tied to steel and the other to the nuclear fuel chain that Western governments are trying to rebuild outside Russia and Kazakhstan.