As global demand for critical minerals accelerates under the energy transition, extractive frontiers are rapidly expanding across the region. Too often, this expansion reproduces long-standing patterns of dispossession, ecological harm, gendered violence, deepened care burdens, and the systematic exclusion of youth and frontline communities from decision-making on resources, development and transition pathways.

This leaves many questions about the systemic disparities that are brought from critical minerals. With mining communities left with all of these human impacts, it begs the question:

“When we talk of critical minerals, critical for who?”

Join The Southern Africa Trust at the Africa Mining Indaba as we convene to strengthen youth-, women- and community-led civic power in extractive-affected contexts by creating practical spaces for learning, strategy-building, storytelling and advocacy that challenge dominant mining narratives and advance people-centred, climate-just and care-centred futures.