By Dr. Richard Munang, Director, United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), Accra
Commentary · first published by the Business & Financial Times, Accra, 9 October 2026
Every answer a chatbot gives begins underground.
Before the data centre, before the chip, before the clever sentence on the screen, somebody dug. The cobalt steadying the batteries, the copper carrying the current, the manganese and the platinum metals inside the clean energy hardware that powers it all: a great share of it came out of African ground. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa puts the continent at about 30 per cent of the world's reserves of critical energy transition minerals, producing more than 77 per cent of the world's cobalt, 65 per cent of its manganese and 83 per cent of its platinum group metals.
So when the world talks about artificial intelligence, it is talking, whether it knows it or not, about African rock.
The world has started counting AI's bills. The electricity bill is counted in gigawatts, the water bill is forcing its way into headlines, and analysts now model the tonnes of copper and other critical minerals the data centre boom will swallow. But look closely at those counts: they read the bill from the buyer's side, asking whether there will be enough, at what price, secured from whom. Where producing countries appear at all, it is as a supply risk or a damaged landscape, almost never as a seller asking what it kept.
Here is the asymmetry in plain figures. Africa supplies the intelligence age its metals, yet hosts only 223 data centres across 38 countries, a sliver of the world's computing capacity. The investment wave now arriving is real and welcome: a one billion dollar geothermal-powered cloud campus in Kenya, a 700 million dollar partnership placing 12,000 advanced chips across five African countries, nearly 900 megawatts of new capacity under development continent-wide. But a data centre on African soil does not, by itself, break the oldest pattern in our economic history: the rock leaves raw, the value is added elsewhere, and the finished intelligence is sold back to us by subscription.
So turn the bill around. Of each dollar the intelligence age pays for African minerals, how many cents stay in the country that mined them? That number has a name. In a method paper published this year I called it the keep rate: the cents kept at home of every resource dollar, counted per country, per commodity, every year.
Nobody publishes it. Respected institutions score the governance of Africa's mining sectors, rank its governments, and gather its tax statistics, but the cents a country keeps of each mineral dollar appear in no published table anywhere. Meanwhile the uncounted exits run at a scale that should settle any argument about whether counting matters: SWISSAID found that at least 435 tonnes of gold, worth about 31 billion dollars, were smuggled out of Africa in 2022 alone. More than a tonne a day. Uncounted.
The decisions in front of African cabinets this decade make the number urgent: data centre concessions, minerals and processing agreements, power allocations, all being signed now. The Rector of the United Nations University, Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, wrote this year that without data, “even the best-funded interventions operate in the dark.” He is describing precisely this. A government that walks into a data centre or minerals negotiation holding its own verified number negotiates; one that does not, guesses.
At UNU-INRA, the United Nations' research institute dedicated to Africa's natural resources, our answer is a working method in four verbs: Count It, Keep It, Convert It, Circulate It. Count what leaves and what stays. Keep more through decisions armed with the number. Convert what is kept into industry and jobs for the continent's young people. Circulate it, so that verified evidence unlocks finance and puts more money in more pockets. Then measure again the following year, because a number published once is an opinion, while a number published every year is an institution.
Across the continent, young African researchers are already running this method with us, from pit gates to market stalls, because the generation that will live longest with these deals should be the one counting them.
None of this is a campaign against anyone. A verified number serves the buyer as much as the seller: supply chains that can show where value went are exactly the supply chains that the world's new due diligence laws reward. The intelligence age needs African minerals. Africa needs the intelligence age's own discipline, arithmetic, applied to itself.
My grandmother, who passed in 1994, used to say: “A lamp that lights another man's house still burns your own oil.” She was right. In this lamp, Africa's oil is rock, water and power. The light is shining in other people's houses. The counting of the oil is overdue.
So we will publish the number: country by country, commodity by commodity, year after year, with every government seeing its own figure first. Artificial intelligence will keep asking for Africa's minerals. The only question is whether Africa answers with a price list or a shrug.
Africa is not poor. Africa is uncounted.
Dr. Richard Munang is Director of the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), Accra.
