Foreign Investment

In 2000, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was enacted with a bold promise to serve as the bridge connecting Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to the U.S. market. AGOA was designed to offer unilateral, duty – free access to over 1800 products in the U.S., in addition to the more than 5,000 products that are also eligible for duty-free access under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, to catalyze export-led growth, attract foreign direct investment and accelerate industrialization across Africa. As AGOA was set to lapse in 2025 and following several negotiations for the Agreement’s extension to December 2028, today the verdict is mixed, and the economic landscape tells a complicated story. In this blog, I argue that the question before African policymakers is no longer whether AGOA is renewed, but what the repeated cycle of lapse and extension reveals: that a unilateral preference regime, however long its runway, cannot substitute for the regional integration, rules-of-origin harmonization, and mid-stream industrial capabilities that only Africans can build for themselves.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid. Focusing in particular on Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal, the AfSDJN will also amplify African voices and decolonize narratives on African sovereign debt . Its activities include producing research outputs to enhance the network’s advocacy interventions. It also seeks to create awareness on and elevate the priority given to sovereign debt and other economic justice issues on the African continent and beyond throughout 2021.

Governments in Africa have been active participants in the big global debates on sanctions, particularly at the United Nations. In recent years, however, the bigger debates seem to be receding into the background as governments get tied up tackling the immediate and practical implications of ever-expanding sanctions by global powers. The growing number and complexity of sanctions regimes impacts African states even when those states are not targeted. And admittedly the approach of championing broad-brush positions (e.g. ‘illegality of unilateral coercive measures’ through the UN General Assembly) is not producing the necessary shield from impact. Sophisticated sanctions regimes are producing sophisticated economic impacts that need to be countered with technical depth, exploiting exemptions, adjusting and sanctions-proofing trading systems, developing sanctions expertise, etc.

In a joint statement released on 6 May 2026, the Republic of Guinea, Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), and its subsidiary Guinea Alumina Corporation (GAC) announced that they had reached an agreement to “definitively” settle the disputes arising from the suspension of GAC’s activities and the interruption of Guinean bauxite supplies to EGA.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid. Focusing in particular on Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal, the AfSDJN will also amplify African voices and decolonize narratives on African sovereign debt . Its activities include producing research outputs to enhance the network’s advocacy interventions. It also seeks to create awareness on and elevate the priority given to sovereign debt and other economic justice issues on the African continent and beyond throughout 2021.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid. Focusing in particular on Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal, the AfSDJN will also amplify African voices and decolonize narratives on African sovereign debt . Its activities include producing research outputs to enhance the network’s advocacy interventions. It also seeks to create awareness on and elevate the priority given to sovereign debt and other economic justice issues on the African continent and beyond throughout 2021.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

On the 10 June 2025, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would ban the export of lithium concentrate, with the ban is scheduled to take effect from January 2027. Zimbabwe, Africa’s largest lithium producer, has positioned lithium at the centre of its economic transformation agenda as global demand for battery minerals accelerates due to the expansion of electric vehicles and renewable energy storage technologies. This update examines Zimbabwe’s evolving lithium policy as the government seeks to maximise national benefits through export bans and domestic beneficiation requirements. It analyses the rationale, timelines and political economy of the proposed bans on lithium ore and concentrate exports, while interrogating the ownership structures of dominant Chinese firms such as Sinomine and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt.

Guinea occupies a structurally significant position in the global minerals economy as the world’s largest holder of bauxite reserves and second leading producer of the ore, which is indispensable for aluminium production and increasingly recognised as strategically important to global industrial supply chains. This update examines Guinea’s intensifying resource nationalism in the global bauxite sector, focusing on the revocation of mining licences, the resulting high-value international arbitration claims, and the government’s planned legal defence. It situates these developments within broader African debates on bauxite’s strategic importance, mineral governance, and efforts to reclaim sovereign control and value from critical raw materials.

An International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) tribunal dismissed Sundance’s arbitration claim against the Republic of Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Australian-headquartered mining company confirmed in a statement released on 27 January 2026. According to the statement, the tribunal, which operated under the ICC Arbitration Rules 2021, issued its final decision following a hearing held in Paris in November 2024 and subsequent post-hearing submissions. The tribunal determined that “Congo had a legitimate basis for revocation of Sundance subsidiary Congo Iron’s exploitation permit due to non-development of the project in the period 2016-2018 and, consequently, all claims by Sundance and Congo Iron have been dismissed.”