Ethiopia Mining & Minerals: Procurement Guide (2026)

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Mines signed USD 4.2 billion in new mining investment agreements in March 2026, covering iron ore, potash, and gold. Gold alone brought in over USD 2.1 billion in the first nine months of the 2024/25 fiscal year, delivered to the National Bank of Ethiopia as 26 tonnes of dore. For foreign suppliers, gold processing, potash crystallization, and iron-ore beneficiation equipment are where the RFQs are opening now.

Ethiopia’s broader industrial procurement picture, covering FX policy, industrial parks, and the sectors around mining, sits in our Ethiopia industrial procurement guide. This guide covers mining and mineral processing only.

What the sector is actually buying

Four product clusters carry most of the near-term capex, and each traces to a named project rather than a market estimate.

Gold processing. KEFI Gold and Copper’s Tulu Kapi project in Oromia broke ground in February 2026, and the company has told investors it is targeting first gold pour in early 2028 and full production by mid-2028, per Mining Weekly’s March 2026 project update. Australian engineering firm Lycopodium holds the EPC contract for the process plant, which the company has designed around a conventional open-pit and carbon-in-leach circuit.

At the smaller end, Akobo Minerals’ Segele mine in Gambella is already producing, and the company’s published three-phase plan adds a vertical shaft and a new carbon-in-leach system to lift recovery above 90%, per Mining Weekly’s coverage of the mine plan. Between the two projects, a supplier can quote anywhere from full CIL trains to elution columns, carbon-handling screens, and gravity concentrators. Our guide to gold processing plant equipment for Ethiopia goes deeper on the spec side.

Crushing and grinding. Every one of these projects, gold, iron ore, and the potash operations below, needs a comminution circuit somewhere in the flowsheet: primary crushers, SAG or ball mills, screens, and the liners and grinding media that wear out on a fixed replacement schedule. This is the one product line that cuts across the whole sector rather than sitting inside a single commodity, which is why we cover it separately in our guide to SAG and ball mill suppliers for Ethiopia.

Iron-ore beneficiation. ZYTB DIM Metals and Minerals Manufacturing, an Ethiopian-Chinese joint venture, signed on to develop Ethiopia’s iron-ore resources as part of the March 2026 agreements, with a stated goal of reaching 2 million tonnes a year within a decade and positioning the country among Africa’s leading iron-ore producers, per the Ethiopian News Agency’s report on the signing.

Ethiopia currently imports essentially all its iron ore and steel-making inputs, so a domestic beneficiation line, crushing, magnetic separation, and pelletizing, is a genuinely new procurement category rather than a replacement cycle. We map the equipment list in iron-ore beneficiation line suppliers for Ethiopia.

Potash crystallization. Two distinct projects sit in the Danakil Depression, and suppliers should not conflate them. Circum Minerals is the advanced one: a 365 square kilometre license, a resource of 4.9 billion tonnes at 18.1% KCl, and a design built around solution mining and solar-pond crystallization targeting 750,000 tonnes a year of sulphate of potash, per the company’s own project overview.

Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund, signed a separate potash agreement with the Ministry of Mines in the same March 2026 round, also in the Danakil area, per EIH’s own announcement, though EIH has not yet published a production timeline. Suppliers of evaporation-pond liners, brine-handling pumps, and cold-crystallization equipment have a genuine opening on both projects, at different stages of readiness. Detail is in potash crystallization equipment suppliers for Ethiopia.

The named buyers issuing RFQs

Six organizations account for nearly all of the sector’s visible capex, and five of them anchor to a specific project a supplier can research today.

Company	Mineral	Location	Status (as of Aug 2026)
KEFI Gold and Copper	Gold, Tulu Kapi	Oromia	Construction under way; first pour targeted early 2028
Akobo Minerals	Gold, Segele	Gambella	Producing; shaft and CIL upgrade under construction
Circum Minerals	Potash, Danakil	Afar	Feasibility complete; no construction date announced
Ethiopian Investment Holdings	Potash (new license)	Afar, Danakil	License signed March 2026; no timeline published
ZYTB DIM Metals and Minerals	Iron ore	Not yet specified in primary sourcing	Agreement signed March 2026; 2 Mt/y target within a decade

Ethiopian Investment Holdings now sponsors mining projects directly rather than only investing in them, holding both the new potash license and a 2025 stake in Akobo Minerals. Bero Mining and Trading, the sixth company in the March 2026 signing, is developing gold production; its equipment plans had not been publicly detailed as of this writing, so treat any specific procurement claim about it as unconfirmed until the company publishes a spec.

FX, letters of credit, and how mining deals get paid

Mining equipment into Ethiopia is quoted in US dollars and settles through letters of credit, and the underlying currency has moved a long way in a short time. The birr floated in July 2024, and by the National Bank of Ethiopia’s 12 August 2026 auction, the weighted-average rate had reached 161.80 birr to the dollar, up from 157 just two months earlier, according to Capital Market Ethiopia’s coverage of the auction.

Demand at that auction ran to USD 470 million in bids against a USD 125 million allocation, with only 9 of 28 participating banks filled. Quote in USD and attach the auction date to any rate you reference; the currency is still finding its level.

On the documentation side, the NBE’s Directive FXD/05/2026, effective 25 May 2026, lets commercial banks approve deferred-payment letters of credit directly for holders of forex retention accounts, without prior National Bank approval, and moves LC fees to an annualised, pro-rata basis. That is a real easing of the historic LC bottleneck, not a removal of it, given the demand queue above. Commercial Bank of Ethiopia remains the dominant issuer.

Two private banks now carry dedicated non-payment-risk backing from the African Development Bank specifically for import and export finance: a USD 50 million facility to Awash Bank and a USD 40 million facility to Dashen Bank, both signed in 2025 and both guaranteeing up to 100% of non-payment risk to the confirming bank. For a first-time mining-equipment sale into Ethiopia, naming Awash or Dashen with AfDB backing, or a confirmed LC through a correspondent in your own country, is the practical way to de-risk the transaction while the FX queue works itself out.

Who integrates the plants

Component suppliers on the gold side sell primarily through Lycopodium, the appointed EPC contractor at Tulu Kapi, which locks flowsheet and preferred-vendor decisions at the design stage, well before the operator’s own procurement team runs a tender. Akobo Minerals, running a smaller and more incremental build-out, buys shaft and process equipment closer to direct, without a single dominant EPC layer in between. On the iron-ore side, ZYTB DIM’s structure as an Ethiopian-Chinese joint venture points toward Chinese engineering and equipment channels for the initial build, the pattern typical of similarly structured resource joint ventures elsewhere on the continent.

The potash projects are the earliest-stage of the four: neither Circum Minerals nor Ethiopian Investment Holdings has publicly named an EPC contractor for construction, which means the vendor shortlist for pumps, liners, and crystallization equipment is not yet fixed. That is the window a supplier wants to be inside before it closes.

Tender platforms and procurement entry points

Federal and parastatal procurement in Ethiopia runs through the electronic Government Procurement portal at egp.ppa.gov.et, administered by the Public Procurement and Property Authority. The platform grew from a nine-agency pilot in 2021 to 74 federal agencies by 2023, with close to 8,000 domestic and international suppliers registered and roughly USD 9 billion in annual procurement volume, per a US Commercial Service market brief. Mining licensing itself runs separately through the Ministry of Mines, which operates its own online mining cadastre and application portal for exploration and mining license applications.

In practice, none of the six named buyers above is running its equipment RFQs through the federal e-GP portal. Project-level procurement, at Tulu Kapi, Segele, Circum’s Danakil license, and the new iron-ore and potash agreements, moves through the operator’s or EPC’s own vendor registration process. The e-GP portal and the mining cadastre matter for licensing, government-side infrastructure tenders, and visibility into who holds what license; the equipment sale itself is a direct relationship with the project team. Default tender language nationally is Amharic, though World Bank- and AfDB-linked procurement, and the mining companies above, correspond in English as standard practice.

Dying conventional channels in Ethiopian mining

The Ministry of Mines runs its own sector-specific trade fair, MINTEX, now in its fourth edition, held 13 to 16 November 2025 at the Addis International Convention Center and inaugurated by Deputy Prime Minister Temesgen Tiruneh, per Fana Media Corporation’s coverage. It is a genuine government-run exhibition, useful for policy visibility and first contact, but it does not substitute for reaching the engineering teams at KEFI, Circum, or Akobo who actually freeze a flowsheet.

The wider Addis Chamber International Trade Fair pulls a broader industrial crowd and is even less mining-specific. Ethiopian mining officials and financiers also travel to Mining Indaba in Cape Town each February, Africa’s largest mining investment gathering, for capital-raising and policy conversations rather than equipment sourcing. Field representatives face the same geography problem seen elsewhere on the continent: Tulu Kapi sits in Oromia, Segele in Gambella, and the potash licenses in the Afar Danakil, hundreds of kilometres apart with no single logistics hub connecting them.

The Addis Ababa importer-distributor network carries consumables and general industrial spares, not process-plant equipment, and China’s roughly 32% share of Ethiopia’s total machinery imports, dominant across steel structures and processing equipment, means Chinese supply channels already have deep incumbency on any project with Chinese JV or financing involvement. What has not closed off is direct access: mine engineering teams on the earlier-stage projects, potash especially, are still assembling vendor lists rather than defending existing ones.

FAQ

Who are the main buyers of mining equipment in Ethiopia right now?

Six organizations: KEFI Gold and Copper (Tulu Kapi gold), Akobo Minerals (Segele gold, producing), Circum Minerals (Danakil potash), Ethiopian Investment Holdings (a new potash license plus an Akobo stake), ZYTB DIM (iron ore), and Bero Mining and Trading (gold, plans not yet public).

How do foreign suppliers get paid for mining equipment sold into Ethiopia?

By confirmed or bank-guaranteed letter of credit, quoted in USD. The May 2026 NBE directive lets banks approve deferred-payment LCs without prior central-bank clearance, and AfDB-backed guarantee facilities at Awash Bank and Dashen Bank cover non-payment risk on qualifying trade-finance transactions.

Is Circum Minerals or the new Ethiopian Investment Holdings project the one to target for potash equipment?

Circum is further along, with a completed feasibility study and defined production targets, but no announced construction start. EIH’s license is newer and earlier-stage. Track both; neither has a named EPC contractor yet, so vendor shortlists are still open.

When will Tulu Kapi need its processing-plant equipment?

KEFI is targeting first gold pour in early 2028 and full production by mid-2028, with the EPC contract already awarded to Lycopodium. Equipment procurement for the CIL plant runs ahead of that date, so the sourcing window for that specific project is closing faster than the potash projects.

Does Ethiopia require a local partner to sell mining equipment there?

There is no blanket local-content law forcing a joint venture for capital-equipment sales. Iron ore and some large infrastructure-linked mining deals have moved toward JV structures with Ethiopian state or private partners, but a component supplier selling directly to an operator or EPC contractor generally does not need one.

Where to go from here

If your catalogue matches one of these product lines, the equipment-level guides go deeper: gold processing plant equipment, SAG and ball mills, iron-ore beneficiation lines, and potash crystallization equipment. For the wider Ethiopian industrial picture, see our Ethiopia industrial procurement guide.

If you would rather talk through where your equipment fits this pipeline, contact us or write to Burak directly at burak@papaverai.com.