In Sefwi Wiawso, in Ghana’s Western North Region, Comfort Owusu has grown cocoa for nineteen years. Her three acres feed the world’s chocolate habit: Switzerland’s, Belgium’s, Japan’s. She has never eaten a bar made from her own beans. The nearest shop sells only cheap, imported chocolate, sweet and waxy, nothing like the couverture that Ghanaian cocoa becomes once it leaves her country. “We grow the cocoa,” she says, “but we do not make the chocolate. Someone else gets rich from what we grow.
Nine hundred kilometres east, in the cobalt-streaked earth of Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a very different but strikingly similar story plays out. Miners haul sacks of cobalt ore that will end up in the battery of an electric vehicle: a Tesla, a BYD, a European hatchback. Few of those miners will ever own a car, let alone an electric one. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies roughly three-quarters of the world’s mined cobalt, yet the wealth generated by that dominance is overwhelmingly captured elsewhere, in refineries in China and battery plants in Europe and North America.
These two scenes, an ocean apart, illustrate a paradox that has defined Africa’s place in the global economy for more than a century: the continent grows, digs and drills the raw materials that power the world, then buys back the finished products at a fraction of the value it exported. Why does this pattern persist, and can it be broken?
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE PARADOX
The scale of the imbalance is documented, not anecdotal. According to UN Trade and Development’s State of Commodity Dependence 2025 report, 46 of Africa’s 54 countries remain commodity-dependent, meaning commodities make up more than 60% of their merchandise exports; in Central and West Africa, dependence runs at 80% and 75% respectively. Africa’s total commodity export earnings stood at $467 billion in 2021–2023, down more than $25 billion from a decade earlier, largely because of falling oil prices and volumes from Nigeria, Angola and Algeria. UNCTAD notes that economies such as Nigeria continue to export over 80% of their raw materials without any value addition.
The mirror image of that dependence shows up in manufacturing. The African Development Bank’s Africa Industrialisation Index 2025 found that although the continent’s manufacturing value-added grew from $285 billion in 2020 to $351 billion in 2025, Africa still accounts for less than 2% of global manufacturing output and just 1.4% of global manufacturing exports. Research firm Andaman Partners, drawing on UN trade data, calculated that in 2023 Africa imported almost $542 billion worth of manufactured and medium-to-high-tech goods while exporting only $192 billion of the same categories, a gap of roughly $350 billion in a single year. Manufacturing’s share of African GDP has averaged around 10.6% over recent decades, against 14% in Asia and nearly 17% in Latin America, according to analysis published by the African Policy Research Institute (Afripoli).
COCOA: GROWING THE BEAN, MISSING THE BAR
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire together supply more than half the world’s cocoa. In 2023, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa bean exports were worth $3.33 billion and Ghana’s around $1.1 billion, according to World Bank trade data compiled through UN Comtrade. Yet the global chocolate market was valued at more than $127 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research. Most of it is made in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States, where cocoa is roasted, pressed and blended into products worth many times the price of the raw bean. Germany alone exported over $6 billion of chocolate confectionery in 2023, according to International Trade Centre figures cited by Statista, nearly double what all Ghana earned from cocoa that year.
COBALT AND LITHIUM: THE BATTERIES AFRICA CANNOT AFFORD
The Democratic Republic of Congo holds roughly three-quarters of global mined cobalt supply, according to industry data compiled by the African Development Bank and Benchmark Minerals. Most of it is exported as unrefined oxides and hydroxides to China for processing into the battery-grade materials that power electric vehicles worldwide, vehicles that remain out of financial reach for most Congolese.
Zimbabwe, Africa’s largest lithium producer, has tried to break that cycle. It banned exports of raw lithium ore in 2022, and in February 2026 extended the ban to lithium concentrate itself. According to Al Jazeera, the move followed exports of 1.128 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate in the year to December 2025, up 11% year-on-year, almost all destined for Chinese processors. “A country like Zimbabwe is exporting raw lithium and, in the process, enriching China at its own expense,“ mining analyst Farai Maguwu said, arguing Zimbabwe needs its own “mine-to-market ecosystem.“ Economist Godfrey Kanyenze was more sceptical, accusing the government of a “deficit in policy implementation“ for granting a five-year grace period on concentrate exports after the original ore ban.
COFFEE, DIAMONDS, AND THE EXCEPTIONS THAT PROVE THE RULE
Ethiopia, the birthplace of Arabica coffee, exported $1.22 billion worth of beans in 2023, 4.9% of global coffee exports, according to trade data compiled from International Coffee Organization figures. Export revenue climbed to a record $2.65 billion in the 2024–25 season as the government pushed exporters toward roasting and branding rather than shipping green beans, part of its 2022 Comprehensive Coffee Strategy. It remains, however, a fraction of what global roasters and café chains earn from beans once they carry a branded name.
Botswana offers the most cited counter-example. Diamonds account for roughly 80% of the country’s exports and a third of its GDP, according to the Diamonds of Botswana report published via Natural Diamonds. Rather than exporting only rough stones, Botswana required De Beers to partner in local beneficiation. By 2023, 86% of rough diamonds allocated by De Beers Group were cut, polished or otherwise utilised locally, and the sector employs several thousand people directly, industry and World Bank assessments show. It is not complete. Most rough diamonds historically still travelled to India for processing, and President Duma Boko’s government announced in 2025 a further push to expand local cutting and polishing. But it shows policy choices, not geology, shape who captures the value.
WHY THE PATTERN HOLDS
Economists point to several intersecting causes. The colonial economy was explicitly designed to extract raw materials for European factories and return finished goods for sale, a structure that independence did not fully dismantle. Since then, unreliable electricity, high logistics costs, fragmented regional markets, thin industrial financing and policy uncertainty have made it cheaper for multinational buyers to import African raw materials than to build processing plants on the continent. Global value chains, largely designed and controlled by multinational trading houses and manufacturers headquartered outside Africa, reinforce this. It is often more profitable for a trading company to ship a container of raw cocoa than to invest in a Ghanaian factory subject to unfamiliar regulation and infrastructure risk.
The costs are not only financial. Processing jobs, the kind that build a manufacturing middle class, are lost to the countries best placed to create them, alongside the tax revenue that comes with them. Environmental costs, from deforestation linked to cocoa expansion to the pollution associated with artisanal cobalt mining, are borne disproportionately by producing communities, while profits from the finished product are captured in refineries and factories thousands of kilometres away.
LEARNING FROM ASIA
South Korea, Vietnam and, more recently, parts of Southeast Asia followed a different trajectory: decades of deliberate industrial policy, protected infant industries, heavy investment in electricity and ports, and a relentless push up the value chain from raw exports to light manufacturing to electronics and machinery. It was neither quick nor automatic. It took South Korea roughly a generation to move from textile exports to shipbuilding and semiconductors, but it shows the transition is achievable with sustained state commitment and infrastructure investment, not simply favourable geology.
CAN AFRICA CHANGE THE STORY?
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have pushed to process more cocoa locally; Rwanda has built value-addition into its national development strategy; Ethiopia is betting on branding; Zimbabwe is betting on export bans. None of these policies has yet closed the gap between what Africa exports in raw form and what it imports in finished form. Some economists warn that abrupt export bans, without matching processing capacity, risk leaving minerals stranded rather than adding value at all.
Whether Africa becomes a manufacturing powerhouse or continues exporting its jobs, technology and prosperity along with its raw materials is not yet decided. What is certain is that Comfort Owusu will keep growing cocoa she cannot afford to eat as chocolate, and Kolwezi’s miners will keep digging the metal in batteries they cannot afford to drive, until the value their labour creates finally learns to stay where it was made.