Nigeria will advance that Africa must move beyond celebrating the size of its mineral endowment and begin building the collective market intelligence, processing capacity and commercial infrastructure required to participate meaningfully in how its minerals and metals are valued.
Nigeria’s Dr Comfort Asokoro-Ogaji, Executive Director of Women in Mining Africa (WiM-Africa), is expected to advance this central African perspective when she participates as a roundtable speaker at the Shanghai Metals Expo 2026 in China this November.
The roundtable, convened by Shanghai Metals Market (SMM), will examine “Eastern Pricing 2.0: Integrating Futures, Physical Markets, Industry and Finance for the Next Stage of Global Metals Pricing.”
According to Dr Asokoro-Ogaji, “Africa cannot build pricing power simply by having minerals beneath its soil.
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“We must put our African mineral ecosystem together — our producers, geological and market data, processing capacity, standards, laboratories, commodity exchanges, financial institutions and regional value chains — if we want to become more relevant in the markets where value is determined”.
A major issue Dr Asokoro-Ogaji intends to raise in Shanghai is whether the next generation of global metals pricing can create stronger connections between international price-discovery systems and the countries and communities from which minerals originate.
WiM-Africa, Dr Asokoro-Ogaji said, is therefore calling for deeper continental dialogue among governments, mining companies, commodity exchanges, financial institutions, laboratories, geological institutions, processors, traders, research organisations, women-led enterprises and regional bodies.