Poor mining regulation deepened Ghana’s galamsey crisis, says GoldBod chief

The Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) chief executive, Sammy Gyamfi, says decades of weak regulation and limited state support for artisanal and small-scale mining helped fuel Ghana’s continuing illegal mining crisis, widely known as galamsey.

Speaking during a Space conversation on X on Sunday, 9 August 2026, Mr Gyamfi said Ghana had taken steps to legalise artisanal and small-scale mining in 1989 but had not put in place the measures needed to make the sector sustainable.

He said successive governments had failed to provide sufficient formalisation support, training, equipment, monitoring and environmental protection for miners operating within the sector.

“Very little was done to provide formalisation support, training, capacity building, and investing in reclamation,” he said.

According to Mr Gyamfi, the lack of effective support was accompanied by gaps in the monitoring of mining operations and machinery. He said Ghana did not establish adequate systems to register and track equipment, geofence mining sites or monitor activities across the sector.

That failure, he argued, left the country dealing with what he called an “age-long problem” rather than a properly regulated industry.

Mr Gyamfi also linked the galamsey crisis to the limited involvement of the state in domestic gold buying. The sector, he said, had been largely controlled by private buyers, creating further difficulties in determining where gold had been mined and whether it had come from legal operations.

He questioned whether earlier state-backed gold purchasing schemes had included effective procedures to verify the origin of gold bought from artisanal and small-scale miners.

“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.

“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?”

Mr Gyamfi said the absence of a comprehensive traceability framework meant the authorities could not reliably establish whether gold bought by the state had been produced through legal mining or through activities that caused serious environmental damage.

His comments place the long-running galamsey problem within a broader history of inadequate regulation and state involvement in artisanal and small-scale mining. While the sector was formally legalised in 1989, he said the support structures required to control it, improve working practices and protect the environment were not developed sufficiently by successive governments.

He also suggested that the lack of traceability affected not only mining regulation but state gold-purchasing programmes. Without systems to follow gold from the mine to the buyer, it was difficult to distinguish legally produced gold from supplies linked to illegal and environmentally destructive operations.