Africa, China and the US: The New Geopolitics of the Energy Transition

For much of the last decade, the global energy transition was framed as a technical exercise, a matter of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, coal plants with solar farms, and internal combustion engines with electric vehicles.

That framing no longer holds.

Today, the energy transition is a geopolitical contest, and Africa has moved from the margins to the centre of it.

From lithium and cobalt to grid infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and clean energy markets, the continent now sits at the intersection of competing global strategies, particularly those of China and the United States. The question is no longer whether Africa matters, but how Africa chooses to matter.

Why Africa Is Strategic Again

Africa’s importance in the energy transition rests on three realities.

First, the continent holds a significant share of the world’s critical minerals, including cobalt, manganese, graphite, and platinum group metals essential for batteries, electric vehicles, and clean energy systems. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has repeatedly warned that global supply chains for these minerals are dangerously concentrated.

Second, Africa represents one of the largest future energy markets in the world. With a population set to double by 2050 and hundreds of millions still without electricity, demand growth will be fastest where access is lowest.

Third, Africa’s grids, factories, and transport systems are yet to be built at scale. Unlike Europe or North America, the continent is not locked into high-carbon infrastructure. It can leapfrog but only if investment, policy, and power align.

These factors have pulled Africa into the centre of global energy diplomacy.

China’s Long Game

China entered Africa’s energy landscape early and deliberately.

Over the past two decades, Chinese firms have financed, built, and supplied power plants, transmission lines, hydropower dams, and renewable infrastructure across the continent. According to Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre, China’s policy banks financed more than $160 billion in African energy projects between 2000 and 2022.

More recently, China has pivoted sharply towards clean energy manufacturing and minerals processing. It dominates global solar panel production, battery manufacturing, and refining capacity for critical minerals, often controlling 60–80 percent of processing stages.

In Africa, this translates into:

• ownership stakes in mining assets,
• control over processing and logistics,
• growing influence in downstream manufacturing.

China’s approach is transactional, infrastructure-heavy, and patient. It is less concerned with governance narratives and more focused on securing supply chains.

America’s Strategic Re-Entry

For years, the United States largely ceded the energy infrastructure space in Africa. That has changed.

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act marked a turning point. These laws are not just climate policy; they are industrial strategy designed to reshore manufacturing, reduce reliance on China, and secure supply chains.

Africa features increasingly in this calculus.

The US has launched initiatives such as the Minerals Security Partnership and expanded development finance through the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The goal is clear: diversify sourcing, reduce geopolitical exposure, and build alliances.

But America’s re-entry comes with constraints. The US capital tends to move cautiously, with strong compliance requirements and political conditionalities. Projects take longer to materialise, and risk appetite remains limited.

The contrast with China is stark, and Africa feels it.

Europe’s Parallel Push

The European Union, for its part, has introduced the Net-Zero Industry Act and Critical Raw Materials Act, seeking to secure inputs for its own energy transition while reducing strategic dependencies.

Africa is framed as a “partner”, but too often remains treated as a supplier, a source of raw materials rather than a site of value creation.

This mirrors a familiar pattern.

Europe’s approach is more regulatory than China’s and more values-driven than America’s, but its underlying objective is similar: to de-risk Europe’s own transition. African minerals, land, and energy potential are increasingly central to that goal.

Yet partnership, in practice, has often stopped at extraction. While EU strategies speak of “mutual benefit”, investment flows continue to prioritise upstream access over downstream capability. Processing, manufacturing, and technology ownership remain overwhelmingly located outside the continent.

This is not new. Africa has been here before, supplying raw materials to fuel industrial revolutions elsewhere, while domestic industrialisation remains deferred to a future that never quite arrives. The energy transition risks repeating this history under a greener banner unless terms are explicitly renegotiated.

Europe’s regulatory power could, in theory, support African industrialisation through standards, long-term offtake agreements, and preferential market access. But without African insistence on value creation, regulation alone will entrench dependency rather than resolve it.

The Risk of Repeating History

The danger for Africa is not competition itself but asymmetry.

If the continent continues to export raw minerals while importing finished clean energy technologies, it risks reproducing the extractive model of the past, only this time in the name of climate action.

We have already examined this risk in our analysis of Africa’s transition minerals economy, where value creation remains concentrated outside the continent.

Energy geopolitics without an African strategy becomes energy dependency by another name.

History offers a clear warning. When Africa participates in global markets without shaping terms, it captures volume but not value. Revenues rise briefly, but capabilities remain thin. Jobs are created elsewhere. Technology learning is delayed. Economic diversification stalls.

The energy transition could either break this pattern or reinforce it.

Exporting unprocessed lithium or cobalt while importing batteries, storage systems, and electric vehicles would lock Africa into a low-value position in a high-growth global market. Over time, this would weaken bargaining power, deepen trade imbalances, and constrain fiscal space.

The risk is not that Africa lacks resources but that it once again trades strategic assets for short-term rents. In a transition defined by technology and scale, that is a costly mistake.

Africa’s Agency Is Not Automatic

Africa’s growing importance does not automatically translate into leverage.

Agency must be exercised deliberately through policy coherence, regional coordination, and clear industrial priorities.

That means:

• setting conditions for mineral extraction tied to local processing;
• negotiating power purchase and manufacturing agreements that build skills and jobs;
• aligning energy diplomacy with industrial policy, not separating the two.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offers a platform for this coordination, but only if energy and industrial strategies are integrated across borders.

Without this, Africa risks negotiating as 54 separate markets instead of one continental bloc.

Fragmentation weakens leverage. Individual countries compete for investment by offering concessions, tax holidays, or regulatory flexibility, often at the expense of long-term value. The result is a race to the bottom that benefits investors more than citizens.

A coordinated African strategy, by contrast, could standardise expectations: local processing thresholds, skills transfer requirements, and infrastructure co-investment. It could also enable regional value chains, allowing processing and manufacturing to scale across borders rather than being confined within them.

Agency is not declared. It is constructed institution by institution, policy by policy.

Energy Diplomacy as Development Policy

Energy diplomacy is no longer about oil and gas alone. It is about who builds factories, who controls grids, and who owns data and storage systems.

African governments must therefore treat energy transition negotiations as development policy, not climate compliance.

This requires new capabilities:

• ministries that understand finance, technology, and geopolitics simultaneously;
• regulators can standardise rules across regions.
• development banks that can crowd in domestic and foreign capital strategically.

As we argued in our analysis of development finance reform, scale without strategy delivers limited results.

Too often, climate and energy negotiations are siloed and handled by environment ministries disconnected from industry, trade, and finance. This fragmentation weakens outcomes and obscures long-term interests.

Energy transition agreements should be evaluated by a simple test: Do they build productive capacity?
If not, they risk locking Africa into perpetual import dependence.

Energy diplomacy must therefore sit at the centre of national development planning, shaping industrial corridors, workforce development, grid ownership, and data governance. Anything less is tactical engagement without strategic direction.

Choosing Partners Without Choosing Sides

The choice facing Africa is often misrepresented as binary: China or the US.

That framing is false.

Africa’s interest lies not in choosing sides, but in choosing terms.

The continent can work with China on infrastructure, with the US on finance and innovation, and with Europe on regulation and markets if it negotiates from a position of clarity and confidence.

Multipolar engagement is a strength, not a weakness.

But it only works when African priorities are explicit.

Without clarity, multipolarity becomes confusion. Partners pursue their own objectives. Projects accumulate without coherence. Strategic outcomes dissolve into tactical wins.

Africa’s leverage lies in its ability to sequence partnerships, aligning different actors to different stages of the value chain, rather than allowing any single power to dominate end-to-end.

That requires discipline, not ideology.

From Resource Theatre to Strategy

Africa’s role in the energy transition must evolve from passive theatre to active strategy.

That means asking harder questions:

• Where will processing happen?
• Who owns the grid?
• Who captures value over time?

If these questions are not answered up front, they will be answered by default, often elsewhere.

Too many announcements focus on headline investment figures rather than structural outcomes. Mines are opened. Power plants are built. Memoranda are signed.

But without a strategy, these activities remain disconnected, impressive in isolation, underwhelming in aggregate.

Strategy connects assets to outcomes. It links minerals to manufacturing, power to industry, and infrastructure to jobs.

The Coming Decade Will Decide

The next ten years will lock in energy infrastructure, supply chains, and alliances for decades.

Africa’s decisions now will determine whether it becomes:

• a supplier of inputs,
• a consumer of technologies,
• or a co-architect of the global energy system.

The geopolitics of the energy transition are already underway. Africa’s relevance is no longer in doubt.

Its strategy is.

“In the energy transition, Africa is no longer peripheral. The only question is whether it negotiates as a subject or remains an object.”

That choice will define Africa’s economic position long after the last fossil fuel plant shuts down.