Paper short abstract:

Africa’s abundant renewable energy potential and rare earth and critical minerals endowment can play a pivotal role in pulling productive investments and developing domestic and regional linkages. We develop a framework and new empirical evidence to identify and direct such investment and policies.

Paper long abstract:

The current global supply chain disruptions have intensified the need to develop and promote resilient production and supply networks by diversifying operations across various regions and markets, securing supply of critical materials and industrial inputs, increasing overall supply chains sustainability and compliance with new environmental trade standards. Re-, near-, and friend- shoring of supply chains are examples of this trend, with significant impact on the governance of supply chains and the developmental prospects of productive transformation. This evolving scenario provides a window of opportunity for African countries to reposition and integrate into medium and downstream segments of several ‘global’ value chains. Specifically, Africa’s natural capital – including opportunity for abundant renewable energy generation and endowments of rare earth and critical minerals – can play a pivotal role in pulling productive investments and result in domestic and regional linkages development.

However, leveraging these opportunities would require African countries to improve their manufacturing capacity, and scaling up production and export through the building of domestic and regional linkages and value chains. Using the EORA and BACI data between 2010-2021 at six digit product level for all African countries, the paper develops a framework that maps global value chains of three selected medium and high-technology intensive sectors (mining equipment, mobile technologies, and wind/solar energy), and analyses how African countries can potentially localise and capture value from these supply networks, including building regional value chains. Industrial policy lessons for productive transformation in Africa are discussed based on the empirical and sectoral case studies.