Europe is positioning itself as a champion of green industrialisation in its engagement with Africa. New investment packages to scale up renewables on the continent, alongside initiatives such as the Clean Trade and Investment Partnership with South Africa, promise partnerships that support local value addition, clean tech manufacturing and industrial development. Yet this narrative sits uneasily alongside policy choices at home. The EU has recently renewed a push to onshore and secure clean technology supply chains, introduced local content requirements to mandate European industries to use components made within the EU , and softened key elements of the European Green Deal. Together these actions suggest that, seen from the outside, Europe’s green transition is becoming less about enabling green industrialisation abroad and more about protecting domestic industries.

China, by contrast, has long positioned itself as a climate champion of the global south. This stance is rooted in decades of south–south climate cooperation, where China has closely aligned its negotiating positions with African countries at UN climate summits, and become the world’s dominant exporter of clean technologies. These elements reinforce China’s image as a reliable climate and clean technology partner for developing economies at a moment when Western leadership is fragmenting, with climate scepticism in Trump’s America growing and the EU struggles to reconcile climate ambition with industrial competitiveness and electoral backlash.

China’s “green industrialisation” in Africa

This narrative has been reinforced by a visible shift in how China invests in Africa. Beijing now presents itself not only as a developer of renewable energy projects or supplier of clean technology, but as a partner in supporting “Made in Africa” industrial value addition. Investment is moving beyond pure minerals extraction toward midstream processing and downstream manufacturing of clean technologies. This aligns with African governments’ rising ambitions to capture more value from their resources. The AU’s African Green Minerals Strategy calls for greater local production, deeper involvement of domestic firms and a move closer to end-product manufacturing.

This repositioning was made explicit at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2024, which placed “green industrialisation” at the centre of China’s Africa strategy. To support this, China created a Special Fund for the China-Africa Green Industrial Chain. Investment patterns increasingly reflect this shift. Since 2022, Chinese foreign direct investment in clean tech manufacturing has accelerated sharply, accounting for around 80% of China’s cumulative investment since 2013. Morocco has emerged as the second largest destination by pledged investment, hosting cathode and precursor facilities and consolidating its role as a hub for Chinese green manufacturing. ECFR field research in Namibia and Zambia suggests that local stakeholders see Chinese firms as more willing than Western counterparts to build the midstream processing facilities, such as refineries and smelters, needed to move up the value chain. They also view Chinese firms as more prepared to support the energy and transport infrastructure required for industrial upgrading.

Three limits to China’s model

Yet there are limits to China’s model in generating industrial value locally. First, project delivery continues to rely heavily on Chinese engineering and construction firms, which constrains positive local spillovers. In Kenya and Mozambique, Chinese-funded energy projects have tended to generate short-term, low-skilled support roles, with limited transfer of advanced technical expertise to local workers. As a result, the employment and skills dividends of energy investment remain low.

Second, mounting overcapacity and intense internal competition in China, which Beijing describes as “involution”, push Chinese manufacturers to prioritise exporting finished clean tech products over deeper localisation abroad, where margins are thinner and risks higher. African efforts to localise clean tech value chains, from South Africa’s solar manufacturing ambitions to Kenya’s push to develop indigenous electric vehicles, are still heavily dependent on imported Chinese components assembled locally.

Third, China’s leadership in clean technologies, underpinned by fully integrated supply chains, scale, dense innovation ecosystems and sustained state support, has undeniably enabled a faster and more affordable energy transition across Africa. But this same competitiveness also reinforces Africa’s position as an end market rather than an industrial base. Exports of Chinese wind and solar technologies to the continent grew by 153% year on year between 2020 and 2024. With clean technology sectors—which Chinese leader Xi Jinping describes as “new quality productive forces”—now accounting for more than 10% of China’s GDP and driving around a quarter of overall growth, the export-led growth from this new driver is one the Chinese leadership is likely to continue supporting.

What Europe and its partners should do

China’s model might deliver speed, scale and affordability in the deployment of clean technologies—but there are economic constraints on how far its approach will support industrialisation that generates sustainable local value. This is where Europe can still play a meaningful role, working with partners like Japan and South Korea, which are increasingly orientating their engagement towards local value creation.

Japan has committed to a strategy of “co-creation” and local value addition in Africa’s industrial development, working with the World Bank to expand midstream mineral processing and clean tech manufacturing capacity, including through investment in industrial zones and enabling infrastructure such as the Nacala Corridor. South Korea, following its inaugural Korea-Africa Summit, has likewise pledged to support value addition in critical minerals, infrastructure development and measures to facilitate trade and investment with the African Continental Free Trade Area.

The EU should work more closely with Japan and South Korea through platforms such as the G7, the Minerals Security Partnership and other plurilateral frameworks to coordinate support for Africa’s green and industrial ambitions. These platforms can move engagement beyond fragmented bilateral projects toward joint investments in enabling infrastructure, targeted financing to de-risk strategic projects and offtake arrangements that guarantee demand and price certainty. This coordination should extend beyond raw materials to midstream and downstream segments of clean tech value chains, including batteries, permanent magnets and other critical components. This would help African producers scale up while reducing single source dependency for all partners involved.

The EU must be more attentive to the external consequences of its industrial and climate policies and provide tangible relief by mitigating their impact and ensuring these frameworks are inclusive of partner countries. Its effort to present itself as Africa’s “partner of choice” will fall flat if it is perceived as protectionist. This requires the bloc to rethink policy instruments that are designed primarily to boost domestic industrial capacity, including the Critical Raw Materials Act’s domestic processing target and local content requirements under the upcoming Industrial Accelerator Act. The EU can address this by expanding the scope of the “local” content mandates to include processing or production undertaken outside Europe, where European companies are involved, or exemptions for strategic projects. This would signal a willingness to share value addition.

The same logic applies to climate policy. Many African countries, alongside China, view the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism  as “protectionism adopted under the pretext of addressing climate change”. The bloc should therefore scale up investment vehicles for technology transfer and co-innovation on industrial decarbonisation in Africa. It should finance this from the next EU budget (the multiannual financial framework) as well as from revenues generated through the auctioning of emissions allowances under its expanded emissions trading system.

Beyond exporters

To capture lasting value from the clean economy, Africa must move beyond exporting or processing raw materials and become a maker of clean technologies. Whether Europe can support that ambition will depend not simply on partnership language or the level of financing, but on its willingness to align trade, industrial and climate policies with the development outcomes it claims to champion. Without that alignment, Europe risks ceding not only industrial ground to China in Africa, but also the political trust essential to forging durable partnerships.