KENYA | EAST AFRICA: East Africa becomes proving ground for the west’s rare earths campaign | Africa Confidential

Africa’s 54 economies export US$266 billion of minerals a year but just over 4% of it is processed on the continent. That leaves the value-added margin, and the leverage on markets, in the hands of Chinese companies and western commodity traders.

Washington’s answer has been political rather than commercial: US Chargé d’Affaires in Nairobi Susan Burns has offered Kenya a ‘preferential trade zone’ with price floors and DFC financing, explicitly pitched against what she called ‘opaque, predatory’ alternatives.

Kenya’s insistence on local beneficiation at the Mrima Hill rare earth mine is more ambitious. It will test whether Western financing tools, from the DFC to EU Global Gateway, can underwrite metallurgy and processing and not just extraction.