Inside Africa: Zimbabwe's Lithium Rush, Who Gets to Add Value at Home?
usga
In December 2022, Zimbabwe's Minister of Mines, Winston Chitando, issued a short and unambiguous notice: “No lithium‑bearing ores, or unbeneficiated lithium whatsoever, shall be exported from Zimbabwe to another country.” The order made Zimbabwe the first African country to impose a blanket ban on exportsof raw lithium ore. A policy note from the International Energy Agency later described it as the continent’s first prohibition on “lithium‑bearing ore or unbeneficiated lithium.”
The government’s message was clear: a country with some of the world’s largest hard‑rock lithium reserves would no longer accept a role as a supplier of rock to other people’s factories. Value, in the language of Harare’s Vision 2030 strategy, would be added at home.
Three and a half years later, that declaration has been tested, accelerated, suspended, partially reversed and tested again. What has emerged is not quite success and not quite failure, but something more instructive than either: a case study in the difficulty of turning a policy on paper into economic transformation on the ground — and in who actually benefits when a state tries.
The rush before the ban
The original 2022 regulation left one important door ajar. While it banned exports of ore, it still allowed companies to export lithium concentrate, crushed and processed ore, as long as they presented “feasible plans” for local beneficiation and committed to build processing plants by 2027. The government framed this as a phased path from exporting rock to exporting higher‑value products, and it set January 2027 as a hard deadline for a full ban on concentrated exports.
The industry response to the deadline was perhaps unintended. Instead of slowing exports and shifting quickly to domestic processing, mining companies began moving as much concentrate out of the country as possible before the window closed. Lithium exports reached roughly 1.5 million tons in 2025, generating about US$571.6 million in revenue and beating volume targets by 33%, even as global prices slumped. Local business outlets reported a 30% surge in spodumene concentrate exports in the first half of 2025, even while earnings dipped as prices fell.
A fast‑tracked crackdown
In February 2026, Harare moved to close the loophole. Mines Minister Polite Kambamura announced an immediate, indefinite suspension of exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates, nearly a year ahead of the original 2027 deadline. The cabinet‑approved ban applied even to cargo already in transit, as authorities tried to stop what one official described as “a frenzy of extraction” ahead of the earlier cutoff date.
On paper, this was a strong assertion of state control. In practice, it underlined a deeper problem that the export ban could not solve on its own: Zimbabwe was still heavily dependent on foreign firms, foreign capital and foreign technology to do the actual processing work the policy demanded.
Who owns the processing capacity?
Zimbabwe’s lithium boom is, in ownership terms, a Chinese boom. Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt bought the Arcadia lithium project near Harare in 2022 for US$422 million, and has since invested a further US$300 million in a processing plant that came online in mid‑2023 with a capacity of 450,000 tons of concentrate per year. Sinomine Resource Group acquired Bikita Minerals, one of Africa’s oldest lithium mines, and has poured roughly US$335 million into modernizing and expanding processing infrastructure at the site in Masvingo Province. Chinese firms also dominate other key assets: Chengxin Lithium at Sabi Star, Canmax at Zulu, Yahua and Tsingshan through joint ventures.
The Institute for Security Studies’ African Futures and Innovation Programme describes the sector as “primarily dominated by Chinese firms,” reflecting Beijing’s wider strategy to secure battery minerals across the global South. Before the beneficiation policy, those firms largely exported raw ore to China for processing. The policy has forced them to build concentrators and other infrastructure inside Zimbabwe. But the ownership structure has not changed: it is still Chinese capital, Chinese engineers and Chinese offtake agreements sitting at the centre of the value chain.
That is not necessarily a failure. A concentrator built and operated in Bikita or Goromonzi creates local jobs, tax revenue and infrastructure that did not exist before. But moving from ore to concentrate is not the same as controlling the value chain, battery‑grade lithium carbonate, hydroxide and cathode materials multiply that value again. Zimbabwe's real opportunity, as the ISS African Futures analysis notes, is using its policy leverage to push beyond basic concentration into higher‑value processing tied to its own industrial strategy, not just to Chinese supply chains.
What communities in mining areas see
In Bikita district, where Sinomine’s expansion has transformed the landscape, communities have found that industrial‑scale investment entails complicated consequences. A 2025 case study by Africa Mining and China in the Global South project documents “Bikita Minerals expansion sparks community disputes”: residents report conflicts over land rights, fears about water pollution and frustration with what they see as an unequal distribution of benefits.
Later that year, the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission went further, alleging “widespread violations of environmental, water and property rights” around the Sino‑Bikita mine. EnviroPress Zimbabwe has highlighted disputes over access to the mine’s Environmental Impact Assessment, with residents arguing that a legally required document has effectively been withheld from them.
The picture is sharper still for artisanal and small‑scale miners. When the raw ore export ban came into force, authorities moved quickly to clear informal miners from lithium‑rich sites such as Sandawana in Mberengwa, where thousands of miners, known as makorokoza, had converged. In clearing the makorokoza, authorities did more than curb smuggling. They redrew the line between who had access to lithium and who did not.
A 2025 study by the Nordic Africa Institute argues that the export restrictions, “intended to boost domestic processing, have instead benefited political elites and marginalised local communities even further.” Artisanal and small‑scale mining supports the livelihoods of an estimated 1.5 million Zimbabweans. Yet by late 2025, Mining Zimbabwe reported that price slumps, tighter enforcement and lack of formalisation had pushed many artisanal miners to abandon lithium fields entirely.
The state’s own bet
The government is not only a regulator; it is also trying to be a player. Zimbabwe’s state‑controlled Kuvimba Mining House, in which the state holds a majority stake through its sovereign fund, has announced plans to build a US$270 million lithium concentrator at the Sandawana mine. Mining Zimbabwe reported that construction of the plant, now managed under Mutapa Energy Minerals, the Sovereign Wealth Fund's mining subsidiary, is set to begin in June 2026, with commissioning targeted for early 2027, just as the full ban on concentrate exports is meant to bite.
The model is a Build‑Operate‑Transfer (BOT) arrangement. Kuvimba has signed a roughly US$300 million deal with a Chinese consortium to finance, construct and operate the plant for a minimum of five years before handing it over. The Sandawana project was strategically significant precisely because it could give Zimbabwean institutions eventual control of a major processing asset, rather than relying indefinitely on foreign‑owned plants.
Whether that promise is realized depends on details that are not yet public: the quality of the transfer obligations, how much technical knowledge is actually passed on, and whether Zimbabwean managers are given more than nominal control when the handover comes.
The ISS African Futures modelling suggests that if beneficiation is implemented alongside broader manufacturing reforms, Zimbabwe’s GDP per capita (in PPP terms) could be around US$2,690 in 2030, compared with US$2,580 under a “business as usual” scenario, and lift an additional 360,000 people out of extreme poverty. Those numbers are modest, but they underline a point often lost in the politics of “resource nationalism”: value addition is not an overnight windfall, but a slow‑building change in the structure of an economy.
So who gets to add value?
On one level, Zimbabwe’s lithium policy has worked as intended. The export ban has forced major investors to build processing capacity inside the country. Concentrators that might never have been constructed are now operating or under construction in Bikita, Goromonzi and eventually Mberengwa. The government has shown that it is willing to tighten regulations, and even to disrupt exports in the short term, to push the industry toward beneficiation.
On another level, central questions remain unresolved. Most of the processing capacity is foreign‑owned and tied into foreign supply chains. Communities in mining areas face environmental and social costs that are not matched by visible, shared benefits. Artisanal miners, who once carved out livelihoods at the margins of the sector, have largely been pushed out of lithium altogether. And the state’s own flagship project at Sandawana will only prove its strategic value if the promised transfer of knowledge and control materialises.
For communities living alongside the mines, the benefits have so far remained largely notional. Zimbabwe has drawn a firm line at the border: no more unprocessed ore, and soon no more concentrate either. The more consequential line, between mining and genuine structural transformation, between processing lithium and controlling the value it creates, is still being negotiated.
