Offtake instead of ownership: the Washington Accord and the bankability of resource-for-security

For most of the last two decades, the standard route to securing African mineral supply was to buy the asset. Acquire the concession, fund the mine, own the output. The capital requirement was large, the political exposure was permanent, and the resulting position was difficult to exit.

The arrangement signed between Washington and Kinshasa in December 2025 takes a different route. The Strategic Partnership Agreement gave the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium preferential access to Congolese copper, cobalt and lithium, and it did so through offtake agreements, financing and guarantees rather than through equity. Alongside it sat American support against the M23 insurgency in the country's east.

Anyone who structures commodity transactions will recognise the financial architecture immediately. Offtake secured by prepayment or a guarantee, with the buyer taking volume rather than title to the asset, is ordinary structured trade. What is not ordinary is that the commercial access is underwritten by a security undertaking between two states.

What the structure achieves

Buying supply rather than assets does three things for the purchaser.

It reduces capital intensity. An offtake with a prepayment element ties up a fraction of what an acquisition costs, and the exposure amortises as cargoes are delivered rather than sitting on the balance sheet for the life of the mine.

It shortens the exit. An offtake has a term. Equity in a Congolese concession does not, in any practical sense, and the history of foreign mining investment in the country is substantially a history of difficult exits.

It moves the operating risk to the party best placed to carry it. The consortium does not have to run a mine in Lualaba province. The existing operators do that, and they are considerably better at it.

In February 2026, Glencore signed a memorandum of understanding with the Orion consortium covering a potential acquisition of DRC assets. That moves the arrangement from framework to transaction, and it introduces an operator with the technical depth the structure requires.

What a lender sees

The financing question is where this gets interesting, because a bank asked to fund against these flows is being asked to underwrite something it does not normally underwrite.

Conventional offtake finance rests on three assessments. Can the producer deliver the tonnage. Will the buyer pay for it. Can the cargo physically move from pit to port to vessel. The credit work is largely about operational reliability and the enforceability of the sales contract.

Here a fourth assessment is unavoidable. The commercial access itself is a function of a bilateral political arrangement. If that arrangement changes, the preferential access changes with it, and no clause in the offtake contract prevents that. A lender is therefore taking political risk on the durability of an inter-state understanding, which is not a risk most trade finance desks are equipped to price and not one that credit insurance markets cover cleanly.

An offtake contract can allocate commercial risk between the parties. It cannot allocate the risk that the arrangement permitting the offtake ceases to exist.

The practical consequence is that these structures need their political risk addressed explicitly rather than assumed away. That means political risk insurance where it is available, export credit agency involvement where the strategic case supports it, and a documented view on what happens to the facility if the underlying accord lapses. Transactions that leave this to the material adverse change clause tend to discover that the clause was drafted for something else.

The volume question

The operating numbers make the diligence point better than any argument about structure.

DRC copper exports in the first quarter of 2026 came to 955,000 tonnes, a fall of 14.6 per cent against the same period a year earlier. Cobalt exports ran to 48,800 tonnes following the lifting of the export freeze that had held volumes back.

A fourteen per cent swing in quarterly copper volumes is the number that decides whether a facility sized on projected tonnage performs. Offtake finance is repaid out of cargoes. If cargoes fall by a seventh, a facility sized on last year's run rate does not amortise on schedule, and the borrowing base tightens exactly when the producer most needs it not to.

The cobalt position illustrates the same point from the opposite direction. An export freeze, imposed and then lifted as a matter of policy, moves volumes far more than any operational factor. Any structure built on Congolese cobalt has to be sized against the possibility of administrative interruption rather than against a smooth production curve, and that means covenant headroom that looks generous until the year it is needed.

The sovereign sits on both sides

There is a feature of this arrangement that deserves more attention than it receives. The DRC came to the international bond market in 2026 with a debut Eurobond, pricing five-year and ten-year tranches. It is therefore simultaneously a sovereign borrower in the international capital markets and a party to a resource arrangement that pledges preferential access to its principal export commodities.

Those two facts interact. Mineral export receipts are the country's dominant source of foreign exchange, and foreign exchange is what services hard currency debt. An arrangement that directs a share of those receipts, or that pledges volumes forward, is a claim standing ahead of the bondholder in economic substance even if it is not in legal form.

Bondholders will look at that. So will the ratings agencies, and so will the Fund in any debt sustainability analysis. A sovereign that wants both a functioning bond curve and a resource-backed strategic partnership has to be able to show how much of its export receipts are committed, to whom, and for how long. That disclosure is not optional in practice, because the market will assume the worst case in its absence.

What this means for an advisor

Four things follow.

The offtake structure is sound and it is the right instrument for the objective. The criticism worth making is not of the architecture but of the tendency to treat the political underpinning as background rather than as a term of the transaction.

Political risk in these structures must be priced, insured or explicitly accepted in writing. Leaving it undocumented does not make it absent.

Sizing must reflect observed volume volatility rather than nameplate capacity. On the quarterly figures above, that means materially more headroom than a comparable facility in a stable jurisdiction would carry.

And the sovereign needs advice on the interaction between its resource commitments and its debt profile, because these are usually handled by different ministries, negotiated by different advisors, and reconciled by nobody until a rating committee or a creditor does it for them.

Mandates of this kind run under counterparty, sanctions and end-user diligence before any transactional step is taken, and in this jurisdiction that diligence is the work rather than a formality preceding it.