Unlocking Critical Minerals Investment Through Offtaker–Finance Coordination

Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are essential for the global energy transition, digitalisation, and strategic industrial value chains. Ensuring secure, sustainable, and diversified supply chains for CRMs has become a priority for governments, MDBs, and private sector stakeholders.

While significant focus has been placed on upstream and midstream investments (exploration, mining, and processing), offtakers – including industrial buyers, manufacturers, and large corporates – play a pivotal role in shaping demand, de-risking projects, and enabling financing. Their long-term purchase commitments are often critical to making CRM projects bankable. However, the perspectives, constraints, and expectations of offtakers are not yet sufficiently integrated into many policy discussions and financing approaches.

Moreover, limited coordination among mining companies, financiers and offtakers remains a major barrier to the development of CRM projects. Indeed, unlocking investment at scale requires stronger alignment across the value chain. Three stakeholder groups are particularly critical, yet often insufficiently connected:
• Offtakers, whose long-term purchase commitments are key to project viability and bankability
• MDBs and DFIs, which play a catalytic role in de-risking projects and through concessional finance, guarantees, and risk-sharing instruments
• Financial institutions, including commercial banks and investment funds (public and private), which mobilise capital but face evolving risk-return and regulatory considerations

Bringing these perspectives together is essential to address persistent bottlenecks such as risk allocation, price uncertainty, ESG requirements, and limited bankability of projects in resource-rich emerging economies