Afrimintel covers 18 African mining assets at intelligence-grade depth across 13 mineral provinces. This is a deliberate editorial choice, not a coverage limitation. Here is the case for it.
Senior institutional readers come to Afrimintel from a reading list that includes:
| Platform | African deposit coverage | Depth model |
|---|---|---|
| Wood Mackenzie | Several thousand globally; African subset in the hundreds | Multi-analyst desks per commodity; subscription priced for institutional buyers |
| S&P Capital IQ Mines (formerly SNL) | Tens of thousands globally; African subset in the thousands | Database-first, with analyst overlay on Tier-1 assets |
| CRU | Commodity-cohort coverage at depth on copper, aluminium, iron ore, fertilisers | Specialist-by-commodity desks |
| Benchmark Mineral Intelligence | Battery-supply-chain focused; African scope concentrated on Li, Co, Ni, graphite | Specialist EV / battery vertical |
| Fastmarkets | Pricing-anchored coverage; African scope where commodity volumes warrant | Price discovery anchor |
| USGS Mineral Resources Online | Free; thousands of African entries | Spatial-reference + colonial-era inventory; minimal current operator-level intelligence |
| BGS Africa | Country-level mineral atlases; topical reports | Continental-survey-grade; not deal-level |
A senior reader will note that Afrimintel's 18 intelligence-grade dossiers are *substantially fewer* than what Wood Mackenzie or S&P offer in this space. That is correct. The relevant question is what Afrimintel does with the 18, and why depth-over-breadth is the editorial choice at this stage.
Specifically, depth-over-breadth makes sense at this stage because:
Field-level provenance — every reserve, grade, operator interest, recent-event entry traced to a named, dated, citable primary document — requires reading the underlying technical reports, not auto-ingesting trade-press summaries. The Kamoa-Kakula 31 March 2026 NI 43-101 Technical Report is approximately 200 pages plus appendices; the Kabanga July 2025 FS Technical Report is similar; the Sukari S-K 1300 TRS effective 31 December 2025 is similar again. The unit cost per dossier of doing this properly is significant. The cost of doing it shallowly across 1,800 entries — which is the only way to scale to that count without a multi-analyst desk — produces *Sourced* claims in name only.
Afrimintel's three-state model (Sourced / Derived / Absent — no fourth state, published at /quality-standard/) explicitly disallows the synthesis-from-summary pattern that lets large databases scale. Each Sourced claim requires a named, dated, citable primary document. Each Derived claim requires a published methodology and inputs that are themselves Sourced or Derived. Absent is preserved as the honest disclosure when neither tier applies. The framework is incompatible with rapid horizontal expansion; that is by design.
The intelligence-grade dossiers cover specific commodity-province-jurisdiction combinations that match the decision-shape map institutional capital allocators actually face: Tier-1 copper sulphide (Kamoa-Kakula), Tier-1 gold under post-settlement (Loulo-Gounkoto), Tier-1 PGE under demerged operator (Mogalakwena), critical mineral pre-FID (Kabanga, Ngualla REE), disputed-tenure capital allocation (Manono), force-majeure recovery operator (Balama), graphite/REE pre-production (multiple), and so on. The set is curated for *decision-shape coverage* rather than for asset-count maximisation.
The intelligence-grade dossiers are the only tier where Afrimintel makes the strongest data-quality commitment: every numeric and factual claim is one of three states (Sourced / Derived / Absent), with the source named and dated, and the claim subject to Audit Log tracking when corrected. Spatial-reference entries are *positionally accurate* but do not carry the same provenance contract; they exist to provide geographic context, not to support deal-level decisions. Research-grade entries sit between the two — operator and commodity verified, deeper structural data not yet completed; operator-attestation entries carry operator-disclosed figures without an independent reporting-code framework. The tier system is itself published; the data-quality contract is therefore tier-dependent and explicit.
The province-scoring framework operates at the geological-terrane level, not the asset level. All 13 African mineral provinces are scored on the published Mineral System Potential / Investment Climate / Composite Score formula, with the formula and inputs published on the methodology page. The province scoring covers 100% of the relevant African geological terrane, even where individual asset coverage is thin. This means a senior reader interested in, say, the West African Birimian or the East African Rift gets the structural geological framing for the entire province, regardless of whether Afrimintel's IG-tier coverage of specific assets in that province is one or ten.
To be honest about the trade-off:
What 1,800 would buy: the ability to support broader screening mandates where institutional analysts ask "show me everything currently producing in West Africa" or "show me all African Cu development projects above 10 Mt." For a Wood Mac–style analyst with that workflow, Afrimintel at 18 IG depth is insufficient.
What 1,800 would cost: either (a) a multi-analyst desk with the editorial capacity to maintain primary-source verification at that scale — which is a scale of operation Afrimintel would reach only after substantial institutional engagement — or (b) the abandonment of the field-level provenance contract, the three-state Quality Standard, and the per-record audit cadence. (b) is not a trade Afrimintel will make; (a) is on the deferred roadmap, sequenced behind commercial validation.
Afrimintel is not directly comparable to Wood Mackenzie or S&P Capital IQ Mines at coverage breadth, because that is not the comparison being made. The correct comparison is to the screening artefact a senior analyst would produce for one asset, in one decision context — and what that artefact would look like once produced.
The Case Studies section publishes worked demonstrations: Kabanga Pre-FID DFI Investment Brief, Manono Disputed-Tenure Capital Allocation Brief, and Loulo-Gounkoto Post-Settlement Re-Entry Brief. Each is a real, dated, primary-source-verified institutional screening on a live decision. The case for depth-over-breadth at this stage rests on what these dossiers contain, not on what the asset count is.
To be honest about the constraint as well as the choice: the 18 represent both an editorial choice and the operational ceiling of a single-editor platform with the published Quality Standard. Even if depth-over-breadth were not the stated editorial position, the count would be in this range — primary-source verification at the field-provenance level cannot scale faster than editorial capacity. As editorial capacity expands through advisor recruitment and in time additional editors, the tier will grow. It will not grow at the rate a thousand-analyst desk could scale at, by design.
The intelligence-grade tier is intended to grow. Each new IG dossier requires reading the underlying technical reports, applying the field-level provenance contract, registering the dossier with the audit-overdue badging mechanism, and triggering the next-audit-due date. Growth pace is bounded by editorial capacity and Quality Standard compliance — not by an arbitrary target. The deferred roadmap publishes the candidate-asset list and the conditions under which each moves from research-grade to intelligence-grade.
The 18 will become 25, then 40, then 60+, sequenced with editorial capacity expansion through the role architecture published on /about/. The shape of growth will follow institutional engagement: assets requested by named institutional readers move into the tier first.