Rethinking EU–Africa ties: The circular economy as a new pact of shared sovereignty

Europe and Africa are bound by history, geography, and necessity. Yet their economic relationship is fraying: total trade between the two continents fell from €467 billion in 2023 to €355 billion in 2024. Behind the numbers lies a deeper imbalance. Europe fears material scarcity and industrial dependency; Africa, meanwhile, still exports raw minerals but imports finished goods, forfeiting most of the value they contain.

At the same time, a new kind of globalisation is taking shape—less about trade volumes than about control over materials, skills and technologies. In this emerging order, the circular economy could replace extraction with co-creation and dependency with mutual sovereignty.

A sharp rise in EU demand for raw materials by 2030 is expected, but the Union is still far from meeting its 2030 target of 24% circularity (with the 2023 circular material use rate only at 11.8%).

A renewed EU-Africa partnership could allow both continents to reach their environmental and development goals.

From crisis to opportunity

The catalyst for this rethink came from Beijing rather than Brussels or Addis Ababa. China’s decision in October 2025 to tighten export controls on rare earth elements (REEs)—already refining over 90% of global supply—sent tremors through European industry. As a result, many European firms have halted production, with thousands facing supply shortages in less than a month.

Europe’s answer has been swift. The RESourceEU initiative translates anxiety into strategy, building on the 2030 target of Critical Raw Materials (CRM) Act goal of 15% of CRM demand to be met by recycling. Urban-mining projects—recovering metals from old electronics and infrastructure—already save around 900 billion kg of virgin ore annually. Yet less than 1% of rare earths are currently recycled, and the World Bank predicts CRM demand will rise by 500% by 2050. Circularity, once framed as an environmental virtue, has become a matter of industrial survival.

Closing the loop is a global need. Since European supply chains stretch deep into Africa, circular sovereignty in Europe depends on circular opportunity in Africa.

Africa’s turn: From extraction to transformation

For decades, African economies have supplied the ores powering global industry without capturing their value. The continent holds 55% of global cobalt and almost half of the world’s manganese reserves, yet sub-Saharan Africa retains barely 40% of the potential revenue from these resources. That gap represents the difference between dependency and development.

Governments from Ghana to Zimbabwe are beginning to act, tightening export rules and demanding local processing. As the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Foreign Minister recently put it, partners should “participate in transformation before export”. If Europe takes that invitation seriously—by co-investing in refining, battery-recycling, and repair industries—it could help build African industrial capacity while securing its own supply resilience. In short, the same factories that reduce Europe’s dependency could increase Africa’s prosperity.

The EU has already agreed to renew the terms with the AU with a framework for cooperation to “ensure that European companies restore the areas they have damaged” — beyond the dedicated global Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDD).

Shared rules, uneven effects

This interdependence, however, also exposes tension. Europe’s regulatory drive—its Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), Packaging Waste Directive (PWD), and many other CE-policies —is reshaping global supply chains. These measures will make production cleaner but could hit African exporters who lack the resources to comply.

E-waste provides a telling example. Countries such as Ghana and Nigeria manage significant volumes of European electronic waste, often through informal recyclers. Across Africa, informal work still represents around 85% of total employment. If EU rules raise environmental standards without supporting transition costs, they risk excluding exactly those workers who already practise circularity on the ground.

A just circular transition must therefore recognise, train, and finance these workers rather than pushing them out of the value chain. The first African Regional Meeting of Waste Picker Leaders in 2025 signalled a significant step in their formalisation to better advocate for their rights and safety.

Theoretically, the Global South circular economy could generate 7 to 8 million job opportunities worldwide. In Africa’s case, the continent needs more economic diversification and job redeployment; if not, one million CE jobs are at risk.

The lesson is clear: regulatory ambition in Europe must be matched by investment diplomacy abroad. Otherwise, the circular economy risks reproducing the inequalities it seeks to correct.

A Continental Plan, and a Common Horizon

The African Union’s Continental Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP 2024–2034) provides a framework for such cooperation. Co-funded by the EU, it identifies eight priority sectors—three horizontal (water, waste, and energy) and five vertical (agri-food and fisheries, transport and mobility, tourism, industry – construction, packaging and plastics, electronics and textiles -, and mining). The AU requires each member state to adopt a national plan by 2026.

Thanks to the African Circular Economy Fund managed by the African Development Bank (AfDB), 12 Member States have already established national CE roadmaps (Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Seychelles, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Tunisia), while four others are in the process of drafting or securing funding for their plans (Egypt, Morocco, Mozambique, and Zambia).

This alignment is more than bureaucratic. If implemented through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which could raise intra-African trade by 45% and add $276 billion to GDP by 2045, circular production chains could finally operate across borders. A recycled-materials hub in Ghana could feed a repair industry in Nigeria, which in turn supplies refurbished components to European manufacturers. Circularity becomes continental before it becomes global.

Building sovereignty, not dependency

For the EU, the circular economy promises to cut reliance on fragile imports; for Africa, it offers a route to industrialisation that does not repeat the ecological or social costs of past models. But success requires a new kind of partnership—neither donor–recipient nor raw-material–buyer, but co-investors in shared resilience.

Three principles should guide it. First, technology transfer and finance must accompany new standards: the European Investment Bank and African Development Bank could co-fund urban-mining and local refining plants, conditional on fair labour and skills-transfer commitments. Second, informal workers must be formally recognised, integrated into Extended Producer Responsibility schemes (like in South Africa) and given access to micro-finance and training. And third, policy coherence is essential: trade, development and industrial policies on both continents should converge around circular goals rather than work at cross-purposes.

Under the Global Gateway strategy, the EU established last year the EU Circular Economy Resource Centre, which facilitates peer-to-peer exchanges and partnerships between EU and third-country stakeholders, and the “SWITCH to Circular Economy in East and Southern Africa, and the Indian Ocean (ESA-IO)” programme, a 5-year €40 million programme, which follows a South-South Twinning approach.

Cooperation would turn circularity from a compliance burden into a development engine. It would allow African youth—who will make up 75% of the continent’s population by 2030—to build the repair, recycling, and innovation industries of the future, while Europe secures the materials it needs for its green transition.

From extraction to reciprocity

What began as Europe’s response to Chinese export restrictions could thus evolve into more: Circularity links Europe’s search for strategic autonomy with Africa’s pursuit of value addition; it turns interdependence from weakness into strength.

Definitions of CE are also very much Western-oriented. It might be an opportunity to get a new Global South-based definition that could emphasise redistribution and fairness, principles that are rooted in day-to-day African circular practices, and slowly lead to circular societies.

If both continents align their policies and investments—Europe focusing on material efficiency, Africa on transformative capacity—the result could be a paradigm shift: a partnership that measures power not by what each extracts, but by what both can reuse.

The circular economy, in this sense, is not merely about recycling—it is about rewriting the political economy of cooperation. Europe’s sovereignty and Africa’s industrial future are, quite literally, made of the same materials.