The Horn of Africa is almost always introduced to the world through the vocabulary of crisis: conflict, drought, piracy, fragile states. The framing is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. Strip away the headlines and a different map appears one of the youngest and fastest-growing consumer markets on earth, holding minerals the global energy transition cannot proceed without, wrapped around the most important maritime chokepoint between Asia and Europe.
The question for economists and investors is not whether this region matters. It is which countries and businesses will help transform its latent resource wealth into sustainable, shared prosperity and on what terms.
Consider the endowment. Africa holds roughly 30 per cent of the world’s known critical-mineral reserves and the Horn’s share is only beginning to be mapped: potash in Eritrea’s Danakil depression, tantalum and lithium in Ethiopia’s Kenticha belt, copper-gold-zinc systems across Eritrea and largely untapped rare earths, titanium and iron in Somalia.
These are the raw inputs for batteries, magnets, fertiliser and green steel. Yet Africa refines almost none of what it extracts China alone processes close to 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths. Ore leaves the continent; higher-value manufacturing and industrial processing take place elsewhere, where the greatest economic returns are ultimately captured.
Now consider the geography. In 2024 some 4.1 billion barrels of crude and refined products about 5 per cent of global supply moved through the Bab El Mandeb, the strait the Horn shares with Yemen. Since late 2023, attacks on shipping have pushed much of that traffic on the long detour around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks and cost to global trade. A region this consequential to the world economy should not be this poorly integrated into it.
This is where the case for a corridor begins. The past decade has been defined by corridors the Oman–India partnership, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor; and the reshoring and “friend-shoring” set in motion by the US–China rivalry. Each is an attempt to route trade and minerals through trusted, resilient geographies. The Red Sea has no such corridor. It has ports fought over by rival powers, but no neutral platform that converts the Horn’s resources into finished value and carries them to market. Creating that missing link is both an opportunity for Oman and a natural extension of its long-standing role as a trusted commercial and diplomatic bridge.
WHY OMAN
Three reasons, each grounded in fact rather than sentiment. First, geography and neutrality. Oman’s flagship port and industrial zone at Duqm sits on the open Indian Ocean, outside both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab El Mandeb the rare Gulf hub insulated from the region’s two great chokepoints. Salalah is already among the world’s most efficient container ports, ranked second globally in the World Bank’s container-port index. And Muscat’s long-standing policy of non-alignment means it is trusted in capitals that do not trust one another a strategic asset that cannot be replicated through infrastructure investment alone.
Second, history. Long before the word “corridor” entered the policy lexicon, Oman ran one. For two centuries an Omani maritime state linked Muscat to Zanzibar, Mombasa and the Swahili coast; Sultan Said moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1840. That history is complex and parts of it the Indian Ocean slave trade among them must be acknowledged honestly. But it also left durable ties of language, kinship and commerce across East Africa. Oman does not need to invent a relationship with the continent; it needs to modernise one for a new era of trade, investment and industrial cooperation.
Third, industrial pull. Oman Vision 2040 is turning Al Duqm into a green-industrial cluster green steel, green ammonia and a planned hydrogen corridor to Europe, with Oman targeting up to 8.5 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen a year by 2050. Green steel needs iron ore; ammonia and fertiliser markets need potash and gas. The Horn holds the feedstock; Oman is building the processing capacity, the clean energy and the shipping. That is the textbook definition of complementary economies creating value through regional industrial integration rather than simple commodity trade.
WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY FLOW
In one direction: unprocessed and semi-processed minerals, iron ore, agricultural commodities and labour. In the other: refining and processing capacity, port and logistics services, green energy and fertiliser, food-security investment, vocational training and re-export access to Gulf, Indian and European markets through Omani hubs. The prize on the African side is vast. The African Continental Free Trade Area the flagship of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 is stitching 1.3 billion people and a market of roughly 3.4 trillion US dollars into the world’s largest free-trade zone, with transport, logistics and agro-processing among its priority value chains. Oman Vision 2040 and Africa’s Agenda 2063 are, in effect, describing two ends of the same bridge.
None of this is easy and honesty is part of the argument. The Horn’s governance is uneven, its conflicts are real and the “resource curse” is a warning rather than a cliché: Sudan’s gold output, well above 60 tonnes in 2024, has financed war rather than development. Gulf engagement to date has too often been competitive and security-driven, deepening rivalries instead of institutions. And the chokepoint risk is live. A corridor built purely on extraction would simply repeat the region’s worst history. The objective must instead be to build integrated value chains that generate jobs, skills and industrial capacity on both sides of the Red Sea.
Which is why it must be built differently and why the economics and the diplomacy belong together. Across the Red Sea, quiet efforts are already under way to build trust between Gulf and Horn stakeholders around a shared peace and security agenda. Economic integration is the natural partner to that work: shared infrastructure, joint ventures and predictable trade rules give former rivals a concrete stake in stability. A convener with commercial credibility and no imperial baggage in either camp is precisely what such a process needs. Oman has played that role in politics for decades; it is equally well positioned to play it in regional economic integration.
The private sector must lead. Governments can set the rules investment treaties, port concessions, mineral-processing and transparency standards but capital, technology and offtake agreements are what turn a map into a market. The model should be joint value-addition on both shores, not raw extraction from one. Long-term prosperity will depend not on exporting more raw materials, but on producing more finished products, stronger supply chains and greater shared economic value.
The global economy is fragmenting into blocs and hedged supply chains. In that world, two geographies that have traded across the same ocean for a thousand years one holding the resources of the future, the other the neutrality and infrastructure to move them should not be waiting for permission to converge. The corridor between Oman and the Horn of Africa is not a favour to Africa or a gamble for Oman. On the numbers, it is one of the more sensible long-term strategic investments left on the table. The task now is to build it deliberately, build it through partnership rather than dependency and to build it to last.
