Africa holds 30% of the world's mineral reserves. It exports crude, phosphate, and cobalt to the world — and imports 70% of its chemicals back. The gap between what Africa has and what it produces is the biggest opportunity in the global chemical industry.
Africa holds 30% of the world's mineral reserves, 60% of uncultivated arable land, and some of the largest hydrocarbon deposits on earth — and yet imports more than 70% of its chemicals. One fact, the SNAP thesis, and what's finally changing.
Bi-weekly analysis of Africa's chemical industry — written for professionals building, investing in, and advising the continent's chemical value chain.
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FEED is written by Adebola Ogundare — a PhD candidate in nanophotonics at Rice University, founder of a carbon nanotube materials startup, and a former process engineer at a plasmonic photocatalysis company.
The perspective here isn't macroeconomic or geopolitical — it's chemical, industrial, and deeply African. It comes from someone who has worked in a chemical plant in Nigeria, built a materials startup in Houston, and spent five years doing deep science at the frontier of energy materials.
FEED exists because Africa's chemical industry deserves rigorous, practitioner-grade analysis — not the development economics framing it usually gets.