BRICS+ Builds Coordinated Critical-Mineral Strategy with South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia

Africa · Southern

Key Facts

—BRICS+ now includes three African members. South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia give the continent a stronger institutional voice in any future commodities strategy.

—A BRICS Geological Platform was endorsed in July 2024. It aims to pool exploration data, map reserves and support joint ventures across member states.

—Africa holds roughly 30% of known critical-mineral reserves. This includes cobalt, lithium, manganese, platinum group metals and rare earths essential for the energy transition.

—India is pursuing rare-earth and battery-metal deals across Africa. Agreements span Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

—The Africa Green Minerals Strategy was endorsed by the AU in 2025. It sets frameworks for beneficiation, export restrictions on raw minerals and domestic processing capacity.

The expanded BRICS+ bloc is quietly assembling the architecture for a coordinated critical-mineral strategy, with South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia positioned as African anchor points for exploration, processing and value-chain integration in a global contest over the resources that will power the energy transition.

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From Johannesburg to a wider African footprint

South Africa joined BRICS in 2010, giving the continent its first seat at a table that then comprised Brazil, Russia, India and China. The August 2023 Johannesburg summit transformed that footprint: Egypt and Ethiopia were invited alongside Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Argentina, and both African nations became full members on 1 January 2024.

With Indonesia joining in January 2025, the expanded BRICS+ now controls roughly 25% of global GDP and about 46% of the world’s population. Three of Africa’s seven largest economies are now inside the tent, giving the continent institutional weight it has never before possessed in a major-power minerals conversation.

This is not merely symbolic. As we track in our ongoing coverage of Africa: The New Scramble, the race for critical minerals has turned the continent into the world’s most contested resource theatre, and BRICS+ membership offers African states an alternative negotiating platform to the Western-led frameworks that have dominated for decades.

The BRICS critical-mineral strategy takes institutional shape

At a BRICS meeting in Russia in July 2024, member governments announced their intention to “expand cooperation in the minerals sector” and pledged joint actions across the value chain while opposing unilateral protectionist measures inconsistent with WTO rules. The language was diplomatic, but the direction was unmistakable: BRICS+ intends to build its own minerals governance architecture.

The most concrete step came days earlier, when heads of geological services from Russia, South Africa, China, India, the UAE, Egypt, Brazil, Ethiopia and Iran endorsed a shared BRICS Geological Platform. The proposed structure includes a coordinating council, a commission for joint ventures, a technology transfer council, a working group on critical minerals and an expert panel — essentially the skeleton of a parallel minerals-governance system.

A unified map of mineral reserves across BRICS countries is among the platform’s first deliverables. For African members, this addresses a chronic weakness: many resource-rich states lack comprehensive geological data, which is a prerequisite for strategic planning and for negotiating from strength with foreign investors.

South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia as African anchor nodes

South Africa is a world leader in platinum group metals and manganese, with deep mining infrastructure and sophisticated financial markets. Egypt and Ethiopia hold significant — though less fully mapped — reserves of phosphates, gold, industrial minerals and emerging battery metals, and both are actively courting BRICS-backed investment to develop downstream processing capacity.

South Africa is pushing a BRICS-Plus blueprint that ties the bloc tightly to African integration through the African Continental Free Trade Area. The vision positions South Africa as a gateway: it would export processed goods across the continent while African partners, including Egypt and Ethiopia, supply raw materials to be transformed into higher-value products at home.

This is not yet a commodity cartel, but it is a deliberate move toward a regionalised value-chain architecture. A formal BRICS-Plus trade treaty, extending earlier IBSA initiatives, is under discussion to create clear rules for joint projects in digital payments, renewable energy and skills development.

India’s parallel push and the great-power hedging game

India is using BRICS and parallel frameworks to diversify away from Chinese-dominated supply chains. Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued at a recent BRICS summit for collective action to safeguard critical-minerals supply chains, advocating diversified sourcing and less reliance on any single player.

New Delhi has signed a rare-earth mining agreement with Ghana, pursued partnerships in Namibia, and concluded minerals-related agreements with South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, targeting lithium, cobalt and rare earths. Just before that summit, India also joined the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative with the United States, Japan and Australia — demonstrating that BRICS members are simultaneously embedded in Western-aligned frameworks.

This hedging behaviour underscores a central reality of the emerging minerals order: BRICS+ cooperation is real, but it operates within a competitive and overlapping network of Western, Chinese, Gulf and multilateral initiatives. No African member wants to swap one dependency for another.

Beneficiation, the resource-sovereignty agenda and what it means for investors

Across Africa, there is mounting pressure to stop exporting unprocessed ore. At the 5th African Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit in Abuja in 2026, policymakers renewed calls to prioritise industrialisation, beneficiation and regional cooperation, and over a dozen African countries have already implemented export restrictions or bans on certain raw minerals.

The Africa Green Minerals Strategy, endorsed by the African Union in 2025, sets continental frameworks for responsible mining, skills development, domestic processing and export restrictions designed to force local value-addition. BRICS+ foreign ministers reinforced this logic in June 2024, warning that the pursuit of transition minerals “predominantly in developing countries” must “not repeat the past injustices and inhumane history of colonialism” and insisting that producer countries must not be confined to mere raw-material suppliers.

For international investors and commodity traders, this signals a structural shift. The days of simply extracting and shipping African ore are being challenged by a coordinated policy push — backed by BRICS+ financing and political cover — that demands processing, technology transfer and local industrial participation as conditions of access.

De-dollarisation, commodity-backed finance and the Latin America read-through

BRICS+ mineral cooperation is tightly linked to the bloc’s broader attempt to reduce reliance on the US dollar. Member states, especially Russia and China, have championed settling trade in national currencies, and some policy proposals reference a “BRICS Mineral Exchange” where gold, platinum and other strategic minerals would underpin alternative payment systems.

For Latin American readers — particularly in Brazil, a founding BRICS member and major mineral producer — this architecture looks familiar. The same debates about beneficiation, Chinese dominance in extraction, and the tension between Western and BRICS-aligned supply chains are playing out across South America’s lithium triangle and rare-earth deposits.

The New Development Bank, BRICS’s answer to the IMF and World Bank, is expected to channel increasing capital into resource and infrastructure projects in both Africa and Latin America. The question for policymakers in Brasília, Pretoria and Addis Ababa is the same: can they use this moment to move from extraction to industrial transformation, or will new partnerships replicate old patterns?

What to watch next

The BRICS Geological Platform will be tested by whether it moves from declarations to funded joint exploration programmes and produces a usable unified mineral map. The operationalisation of a formal critical-minerals working group — with common standards, joint investment vehicles or price-stabilisation mechanisms — would mark a significant escalation.

Watch also for concrete steps on de-dollarisation via commodities, such as increased intra-BRICS minerals trade priced in national currencies or pilot commodity-backed settlement platforms. Western counter-moves, including the expansion of the US-led Mineral Security Partnership and EU-Africa Green Deals targeting the same assets, will shape the competitive landscape.

For South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia, the test will be whether they can coordinate through AfCFTA and AU frameworks to present shared positions on beneficiation — or whether bilateral deals with China, India and Gulf states fragment the continental approach. The prize, by some estimates, could be US$1.6 trillion in mineral revenues over 25 years if governance reforms and value-addition plans succeed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the BRICS critical-mineral strategy?

It is an emerging framework for cooperation among BRICS+ members on exploration, mapping, processing and value-chain integration for critical minerals such as rare earths, platinum group metals, lithium and cobalt. The strategy includes a BRICS Geological Platform endorsed in July 2024, a proposed working group on critical minerals, and political commitments to oppose export restrictions that harm producer countries. It is not yet a formal cartel but represents a deliberate effort to build a parallel minerals-governance architecture outside Western-led frameworks.

Which African countries are part of the BRICS critical-mineral strategy?

South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia are the three African members of BRICS+ and are positioned as key hubs for the bloc’s minerals agenda. South Africa is a world leader in platinum group metals and manganese, while Egypt and Ethiopia hold significant reserves of phosphates, gold, industrial minerals and emerging battery metals. All three are actively seeking BRICS-backed investment to develop processing and refining capacity rather than simply exporting raw ore.

How does the BRICS minerals push affect global supply chains?

BRICS+ collectively controls dominant positions in oil, gas and key critical metals, and its members are building alternative financing, mapping and trading infrastructure that could reduce reliance on Western-dominated supply chains. However, internal rivalries and the fact that members like India and Brazil also participate in US-led initiatives mean the landscape remains competitive rather than bipolar. For companies and investors, the practical effect is a more complex operating environment where access to African minerals increasingly requires local processing commitments and navigation of overlapping regulatory frameworks.