New African Mineral Value Chain Centre Debuts At Mining Indaba

[Cape Town, South Africa | February 10, 2026] As global demand for transition and technology minerals surges, countries in the Global South must redefine their mineral assets not just through the lens of international supply chains, but through domestic development imperatives.

The Linkage-Based Criticality Matrix (LBCM™), developed by the Centre for African Mineral Value Chains (CAMVaC)—the policy research arm of ESG Frontiers—provides policymakers with a robust tool to prioritise strategies and investments aligned with local realities and long-term resilience.

South Africa’s Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy (released May 2025) is a bold step forward, classifying minerals like manganese as high-critical and emphasising job creation, industrial advancement, and national security. Yet, like many regional frameworks, it leans on export value and global demand without fully quantifying how minerals anchor domestic jobs, infrastructure, knowledge flows, and institutional capacity.

In collaboration with labour unions, researchers, and policy actors, ESG Frontiers and CAMVaC are advancing the LBCM™ as a complementary diagnostic. Grounded in producer economies—especially in the Global South—this tool assesses criticality through linkages: backward inputs, forward beneficiation, knowledge/skills, innovation, horizontal spillovers, and geopolitical leverage.

“This is not about replacing national strategies,” Nedohe emphasises. “It’s about completing them. The LBCM  helps us ask: If we remove a mineral, what collapses? What must be rebuilt? And who bears the cost?”

In applying the LBCM at CAMVaC, coal remains South Africa’s most critical mineral today due to its extensive linkages: powering ~80% of electricity, underpinning Sasol’s coal-to-liquids process (supplying ~30% of national liquid fuels), and sustaining ~80,000–110,000 direct mining jobs with vast downstream multipliers.

Yet, with accelerating global net-zero commitments and a projected ~50% decline in thermal coal exports by 2035, coal’s criticality is eroding. This inflection point elevates manganese as the emerging successor: its forward linkages in LMFP batteries could unlock R50+ billion in value addition, 50,000+ new jobs, Mintek-led innovation spillovers, and geopolitical leverage to diversify from China’s processing dominance. The LBCM quantifies this shift, positioning manganese as the strategic bridge to green industrialisation.

The LBCM is statistically robust, tested through Monte Carlo simulations across more than 30 sub-indicators and 7–8 dimensions. This rigour ensures replicability and underpins the development of a Python-based dashboard for policymakers to interact with the diagnostic in real time.

Soft-launched in Cape Town on the sidelines of Africa’s largest mining event, CAMVaC is grateful for the support of stakeholders during the research process—especially the Minerals Council South Africa, Mintek, and regional DMRE offices. These partners will be engaged further to ensure that the next iteration of the CMS-SA is scientifically benchmarked amongst the best in the world.

“We need to stop borrowing frameworks that were never designed for us,” says Nedohe. “The LBCM is one way to start writing our own.”

Further stakeholder engagements with labour, government, and development finance institutions are planned for early 2026 to refine and operationalise this approach.

As part of the Cape Town soft‑launch, CAMVaC also reached out to neighbouring states—including Namibia, Zimbabwe, and partners across the broader Southern region—to gauge appetite and begin harmonising approaches to mineral criticality in the Global South.