Africa’s ambition to build a competitive battery industry and wider clean energy manufacturing base will remain out of reach unless countries fix their macroeconomic weaknesses and move away from exporting raw minerals, Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson has warned.
Speaking at the 2026 Future of Energy Conference in Accra, Dr Forson argued that extracting lithium, manganese and graphite will mean little if African economies continue shipping those resources abroad without processing them into higher value products.
“To import batteries, this must change. Africa must move from raw exports to high-value production,” he said.
The conference, organised by the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, has brought together policymakers, investors and energy sector leaders to discuss how the continent can manage its extractive resources within the global energy transition.
Stability Must Come Before Industrial Expansion
For Dr Forson, the first problem is not the absence of resources. Africa has plenty of those. The weakness lies in the economic environment surrounding investment.
He pointed to inflation, volatile exchange rates, high interest rates, unsustainable public debt and fiscal indiscipline as some of the pressures that make long-term industrial investment difficult.
“Macroeconomic stability is therefore not separate from industrial policy; it is indeed the foundation,” he stressed.
The Finance Minister used Ghana’s recent economic performance as an example of what he believes that foundation should look like.
Inflation, he said, declined from 23.8% at the end of 2024 to 4.6% in July 2026. Ghana’s economy expanded by 6.0% in 2025 and 6.4% in the first quarter of this year, while external buffers strengthened and interest rates declined.
Still, he cautioned against treating the stabilisation numbers as the final achievement. “But stability is obviously not the destination; it is the launchpad for transformation,” Dr Forson said.
Energy Poverty Remains a Hard Constraint
That transformation runs straight into Africa’s electricity problem.
Roughly 600 million people on the continent still lack access to electricity, while Africa attracts only about 2% of global clean energy investment.
“We cannot industrialise a continent the world considers too risky to power,” Dr Forson told participants.
He said countries must improve the performance of utilities, provide predictable regulation and create investment opportunities that private capital can trust.
Ghana, he disclosed, is pursuing a state-owned 1,200 megawatt gas-fired power plant intended to provide dependable baseload electricity for industry.
The project fits into the government’s argument that Africa’s industrial ambitions will require reliable power before talk of battery manufacturing and clean energy value chains can become commercially serious.
Financing Cannot Stop at Extraction
Power generation alone will not solve the problem.
Dr Forson said financing remains another major constraint, noting that Africa’s debt service costs in 2025 amounted to more than 85% of the continent’s total energy investment.
That leaves governments with limited fiscal room to fund energy infrastructure directly.
“We need guarantees, blended finance, local currency funding, deeper capital markets and credible public-private partnerships.
“But that finance must be affordable, and it must build industries, not simply fund extractives.” - Dr Forson
The distinction is central to his argument.
Africa, he said, cannot simply exchange one dependence for another by replacing crude oil exports with exports of raw critical minerals.
“Our resources must become industrial inputs.
“We must not replace fossil fuel exports with raw mineral exports and call it transformation, because that is not transformation.” - Dr Forson
AfCFTA Must Become an Industrial Platform
Dr Forson also pushed for a continental rather than country-by-country approach to industrialisation.
He said Africa’s 54 fragmented economies would struggle to build competitive battery and clean energy industries individually.
The African Continental Free Trade Area, in his view, offers the market scale needed for manufacturing, but only if countries produce goods that can be traded across the continent.
“We must move from trading what we produce to producing what Africa trades in,” he said.
Ghana Moves From Stability to Transformation
The Finance Minister described Ghana’s strategy in two phases.
The first, he said, was stabilisation through fiscal discipline and coordination with monetary authorities. The next is industrial transformation led increasingly by private investment.
“For Ghana, stability was phase one, but transformation will certainly be our phase two,” he said.
His closing message was less technical and more pointed.
“The resources are here in Africa; the market is with us; the people of Africa are ready. Let us turn Africa’s potential into production, production into jobs, and jobs into prosperity.” - Dr Forson
The Future of Energy Conference continues in Accra with sessions focused on battery value chains, critical minerals, energy storage and Africa’s place in the changing global energy economy.
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