Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), Sammy Gyamfi, has linked Ghana’s longstanding illegal mining crisis to years of inadequate formalisation, regulation and state support for artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM).
Speaking during a Space discussion on X on Sunday, August 9, 2026, Mr Gyamfi said although Ghana introduced measures to formalise artisanal and small-scale mining in 1989, successive administrations failed to provide the systems and resources required to make the sector sustainable.
He identified inadequate training, capacity development, access to appropriate equipment, effective monitoring and environmental reclamation as some of the major shortcomings that have allowed illegal mining to thrive.
“Very little was done to provide formalisation support, training, capacity building, and investing in reclamation,” he said.
According to Mr Gyamfi, the country also failed to develop comprehensive mechanisms to register and monitor mining equipment, digitally map or geofence mining operations and effectively track activities across mining communities.
He said the absence of these measures had created significant gaps in the management of the sector and contributed to the persistence of illegal mining over several decades.
Mr Gyamfi described galamsey as an “age-long problem”, arguing that addressing it requires more than periodic crackdowns and enforcement operations.
He also raised concerns about the limited role of the state in the domestic gold purchasing industry, which he said had historically been dominated by private buyers.
The GoldBod CEO questioned whether previous government-backed gold purchasing initiatives had sufficient systems to establish the origin of gold acquired from artisanal and small-scale miners.
He referred to the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme introduced in 2021, under which government purchased gold for purposes including the Gold-for-Oil programme, foreign exchange reserves and other national financial needs.
“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 said.
Mr Gyamfi, however, questioned whether adequate traceability mechanisms were in place to determine the source of the gold purchased under those programmes.
“But did you ever hear there was traceability under the ex-government? Did you ever hear an effort, even an effort to ensure that the gold they were buying for oil, gold for reserve, gold for forex was traceable?” he asked.
He argued that without a reliable system for tracking gold from the point of production to the point of purchase, authorities could not effectively determine whether the commodity was obtained from licensed mining operations or from illegal activities that damage the environment.
Mr Gyamfi maintained that strengthening formalisation, monitoring and traceability across the artisanal and small-scale mining value chain would be essential to tackling illegal mining and ensuring that Ghana derives sustainable economic benefits from its gold resources.
