Poor formalisation of small-scale mining worsened galamsey crisis – GoldBod CEO

Sammy Gyamfi, CEO of the Ghana Gold Board, has highlighted an essential factor contributing to Ghana’s ongoing illegal mining crisis: the poor formalisation of small-scale mining over the decades. Despite formalisation efforts starting in 1989, Gyamfi claims that successive governments neglected to provide adequate training, equipment, monitoring, and environmental safeguards for sustainable small-scale mining.

Additionally, the predominance of private gold-buying entities in the domestic market made it challenging for the government to oversee the origin of gold purchased from miners, posing a significant tracking obstacle.

Gyamfi questioned the efficacy of government-backed gold-buying initiatives, such as the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme initiated in 2021, aimed at supporting gold reserves, forex earnings, and foreign exchange. He raised concerns about the traceability of gold purchases, asking whether previous arrangements ensured that the gold bought was from legitimate operations.

"When government decided to go into gold purchases in 2021 under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, they were doing gold for oil, they were doing gold for reserves, they were doing gold for forex," he pointed out. However, he highlighted the absence of traceability under the former government, questioning whether there were even efforts to ensure the gold procured for such purposes was traceable.

Furthermore, Gyamfi criticized the lack of systems to register and monitor mining equipment, geofence mining activities, and track operations across mining areas. He emphasized that the absence of a robust traceability framework had complicated the process of determining if gold purchased by the state came from licensed operations or environmentally detrimental illegal mining.