The AfDB-AU Ministerial Forum on #CriticalMinerals met in Abidjan on 10 July 2026. Forty-eight African heads of state had already endorsed Mission 300. The African Green Minerals Strategy exists. #AfCFTA exists. The Africa Mining Vision has been on the table since 2009. Two weeks after Abidjan, #PACJA and partners convened 376 civil society and labor organizations virtually to sit with what the Forum produced. The most striking finding came from a live poll of 67 participants. Asked to identify the single biggest barrier to turning Africa's minerals into African prosperity — 48% said #governance and weak institutions. #Finance came second at 27%. Infrastructure and skills barely registered. Sit with that for a moment. The continent is not short of frameworks. Frameworks are, at this point, abundant. What participants were naming is something harder to fix — the gap between a ministerial communiqué and a mining community in eastern DRC that has never seen a contract, never had a labour inspector visit, never received a benefit from the cobalt beneath its feet. @Azagabe Appolinaire ZAGABE of the DRC Climate Change Network framed it around four questions that no framework has yet answered for his communities: who decides, who bears the risk, who enforces the rules — and when something goes wrong, who is left holding it. Those are not policy questions. They are accountability questions. And they do not get resolved in Abidjan. 🔗 pacja.org #PACJA #CriticalMinerals #ClimateJustice #Africa #AfDB #CivilSociety @Eugene_Nforngwa @FESonline @acsea_54