Africa battery value chain moves up a step as DRC approves Musompo precursor zone
Kinshasa’s council of ministers cleared the Lualaba site in February, targeting $2bn of private capital across 900 hectares. Zimbabwe has built the continent’s first lithium sulphate plant under an export ban. The cathode and cell stages that carry most of the margin remain unbuilt everywhere on the continent.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s council of ministers approved the Musompo Special Economic Zone as a priority project on 20 February. The 900-hectare site in Lualaba province is intended to produce nickel-manganese-cobalt precursor powders, the chemical input to a battery cathode. Construction costs are put at over $200 million, the zone targets around $2 billion in private investment, and the projections attached to it run to 25,000 direct and 60,000 indirect jobs. Construction was launched in March 2025 under then-Industry Minister Louis Watum Kabamba.
Below that step, the chain already runs. Zimbabwe banned exports of unprocessed lithium ore in December 2022, suspended exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates with immediate effect on 25 February this year, and in an April letter to the Chamber of Mines set conditions for resumption that included written commitments on timelines for lithium sulphate plants before 1 January 2027. A 10 per cent export tax continues on concentrate until the January 2027 ban. Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, owned by Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, has completed a $400 million sulphate plant at Arcadia. Sinomine’s $500 million facility at Bikita and Yahua’s plant at Kamativi are both still under construction.
Above it, the chain stops. The DRC and Zambia have been working since 2023 on a joint precursor plant, originally envisaged at around 100,000 tonnes a year of NMC 622 material, which would be large by global standards. The Natural Resource Governance Institute has described it as the proof of concept the African Green Minerals Strategy calls for, since it tests whether two governments can share the benefits of a plant only one of them can host. The location remains disputed between them.
Romain Deniel, chief executive of Arise IIP, the developer involved in several Congolese special economic zones including Musompo, told the Makutano forum in November that the project appeared to have slowed after the industry minister left in August. Deniel has also said that establishing a zone of this kind draws in four to six ministries and demands a matching capacity to coordinate them. In February, Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka received the Congolese Battery Council and the International Trade Centre to discuss technical support and access to international markets.
The African Development Bank puts the DRC at 51 per cent of global cobalt reserves and has argued that the country’s hydropower makes it a plausible low-emissions producer of precursor materials and cells. Against that, BloombergNEF recorded lithium-ion pack prices at $108 per kilowatt-hour in December 2025, down from $139 in 2023. Any plant approved this year enters a market whose costs have already been driven down twice by Chinese capacity operating at scale.
University teams, research institutions and innovation hubs from across the continent gather in Accra on 25 and 26 August for the AfroHackathon at the Future of Energy Conference, an Africa Change Lab initiative built around the lithium-ion value chain and the African Green Minerals Strategy. Its organisers connect the innovators taking part with industry partners able to move a prototype towards commercialisation.
