Spatial data and lithium in Africa

From Ore to Orbit: Why Africa’s Lithium Future Will Be Won in Space

Key Takeaways

• Africa’s lithium future hinges on data sovereignty: owning space-based geospatial insights shifts power from foreign extractors to African governments and investors.

• Satellite tech is transforming mining governance—enabling precise exploration, environmental monitoring, and smarter industrial planning.

• The race for lithium wealth is also a race for space infrastructure control; winning means embedding these tools in African institutions and policy now.

By George Katito*

Lithium-rich African states sit at the collision point of two revolutions: a new scramble for critical minerals and a quiet boom in African space capability. Whether this ends in yet another cycle of extraction and dispossession, or in sovereign control and long-term prosperity, will be decided as much by who owns the data as by who owns the ore.

Rethinking the “bad governance” story

The stock storyline about mining in Africa is familiar: foreign corporations secure concessions, rip out resources at speed, and leave behind degraded landscapes and destabilised communities, with “poor governance” as the standard explanatory note. Yet this narrative underplays a more basic structural problem: most African governments, communities, and even domestic investors are operating with outdated, patchy or externally controlled data about what is in the ground, how fast it is being removed, and what damage is being done in the process. In that context, weak bargaining, poorly designed royalties, and lax enforcement are not surprising outcomes but near-inevitable by-products of information asymmetry.

A new African space economy

Far from being a sci‑fi sidebar, space and geospatial capabilities are now a recognised economic sector in Africa, with the industry estimated in the tens of billions of dollars and growing steadily. More than 20 African countries have designed, built, or operated satellites, with states such as Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya moving from one‑off demonstration missions towards more systematic Earth observation programmes. The African Space Agency (AfSA), headquartered in Egypt under an African Union mandate, is emerging as a continental hub to coordinate these efforts, including Earth observation for land use, environmental monitoring and resource governance.

For investors, this is not charity but signal: African governments are allocating hundreds of millions of dollars annually to space activities despite fiscal pressure, indicating a strategic commitment to satellite infrastructure and data systems through 2030. For resource politics, it means that the technical means to generate independent, policy‑relevant data on mining and land use is no longer confined to external partners.

Satellites as lithium discovery engines

Modern Earth observation is less about pretty pictures and more about layered, quantitative sensing of geology, vegetation, water and infrastructure over time. In the context of lithium (especially hard‑rock pegmatites), several modalities are already operationally relevant.

First, structural mapping: radar missions such as Sentinel‑1 and L‑band systems like ALOS PALSAR can map faults, shear zones and other structural fabrics associated with pegmatite emplacement, even under partial cover. Second, mineral “fingerprints”: multispectral and hyperspectral sensors (for example Landsat, Sentinel‑2, ASTER and commercial hyperspectral missions) allow detection of alteration minerals and lithium‑associated phases such as lepidolite or spodumene via their distinctive spectral signatures, guiding field campaigns rather than replacing them.

Third, high‑precision planning: sub‑metre optical imagery from commercial constellations (Planet, Maxar, Airbus and others) supports detailed mapping of outcrops, pit expansion, access roads, and drill pad placement, materially reducing wasted metres of drilling and associated capital expenditure. Fourth, seeing through the forest: airborne and satellite LiDAR, together with radar‑derived digital elevation models, reveal subtle topographic expressions of pegmatite swarms beneath vegetation, often in terrains where traditional mapping is slow or risky. Finally, monitoring the social licence: repeated imagery and derived products (land‑cover change, water indices, tailings footprint mapping) provide near‑real‑time evidence of environmental performance, from river sediment loads downstream of pits to informal settlement growth at mine fringes.

Used well, this suite of tools converts exploration from a high‑risk, capital‑intensive gamble into a staged, data‑driven process where each field decision is justified by a stack of remotely sensed evidence. That same stack, crucially, can sit on African servers, be interpreted by African scientists, and be used by African regulators in negotiations with foreign operators.

Zimbabwe: from “promising province” to global node

Zimbabwe illustrates both the promise and the urgency of this shift. In just a few years it has moved into the first tier of global lithium producers, with hard‑rock projects ramping up production sharply as new capital has flowed into the sector. Analysts now place Zimbabwe among the top suppliers worldwide, and the largest in Africa, making it a critical node in global battery value chains despite severe power, logistics and policy headwinds.

Chinese investors alone have committed well over a billion dollars since the early 2020s to secure and expand lithium assets in the country, and Zimbabwe has announced plans to curb raw concentrate exports in favour of domestic processing, including new lithium conversion facilities. This is, on paper, a textbook move up the value chain—but its success depends heavily on accurate, sovereign data about reserves, production, and environmental impacts to calibrate fiscal regimes, infrastructure planning, and industrial policy.

Data as sovereignty, not slogan

“Data is the new oil” is now a cliché; in the African lithium context, data is closer to a new form of sovereignty capital. Sovereign access to, and control over, high‑resolution geospatial data changes three things at once.

First, negotiating power: governments with independent resource and environmental baselines are less vulnerable to “information discounts” when granting licences or renegotiating fiscal terms; the ability to cross‑check company‑reported reserves, production and footprint with satellite‑derived indicators materially alters bargaining dynamics. Second, domestic value addition: spatially explicit data on deposits, infrastructure, water and energy constraints can inform where it is actually viable to co‑locate conversion plants, battery materials facilities and supporting logistics, making policies like Zimbabwe’s processing push more than aspirational slogans.

Third, risk reduction for credible capital: investors with long horizons—development finance institutions, pension funds, serious industrial players—benefit from transparent, sovereign datasets on tenure, cumulative impacts and regional infrastructure, lowering due‑diligence costs and project risk compared to environments where only operators control the data. In practice, this implies that the key governance question is no longer simply “who owns the mine?” but “who owns and curates the data infrastructure that defines the mine, its risks and its externalities?”.

From niche capability to policy instrument

The African Union has explicitly linked space policy to Agenda 2063, and AfSA’s early programme priorities—Earth observation, data sharing and capacity building—are directly relevant to mining governance. Yet unless this capability is hard‑wired into national mining cadastres, environmental impact assessment systems, and revenue authorities, it risks remaining a technocratic curiosity rather than a lever of structural change.

For frontrunner producers like Zimbabwe, the near‑term agenda is less about prestige launches and more about integrating satellite‑derived products into licensing and monitoring workflows; training a cadre of geospatial analysts embedded in geological surveys and ministries; and ensuring that data architectures and standards are set in African institutions rather than imported wholesale from external partners. At continental level, interoperable platforms—building on initiatives like the African Data Cube—could allow cross‑border monitoring of critical mineral corridors, from tailings plumes to rail bottlenecks, with AfSA acting as both custodian and broker.

The lithium window is narrow

Lithium markets are already volatile, with prices swinging sharply as new projects come online and demand projections are revised. Africa’s ability to translate its geological endowment into durable development gains will therefore depend less on the mere presence of ore and more on how quickly states can convert emerging space and geospatial capabilities into routine instruments of mining governance, industrial policy and community protection.

The core argument is blunt: if African actors do not own and operationalise the data that underpins their lithium story, others will happily do it for them—and will bank the margin. If they do, the continent’s “new space race” stops being a spectacle and becomes an essential piece of economic statecraft.

*George Katito is CEO/Founder of Geostratagem