Galamsey’s real bill paid at tap, market, clinic – Let’s count it

From January to 20 October this year, small-scale miners exported 85.4 tonnes of gold worth $11.6 billion, GoldBod’s chief executive told a minerals forum. Large-scale mines exported 76 tonnes worth $11.1 billion over the same months.

Last year, for the first time, small-scale gold overtook the big mines by volume.

That is real money. In 2025, the sector brought in $10.8 billion in foreign exchange, which GoldBod links to a 41 per cent rise in the cedi against the dollar.

But every gold bar carries a second invoice, and it arrives somewhere else.

It arrives at the water works. Ghana’s Environmental Protection Authority has recorded river turbidity, the muddiness of water, up to 14,000 units, where drinking water should not pass 5.

The Authority’s chief executive at the time estimated that restoring a single polluted water body could cost not less than $300 million.

A review of 45 studies, led by scientists at the CSIR-Crops Research Institute in Kumasi, found arsenic in vegetables from mining districts at up to 200 times the international food safety limit, and mercury at up to 400 times.

This week Ghana Gas warned that digging beneath its pipelines in the Western and Ashanti regions could cause damage that takes months to repair, with knock-on effects on electricity.

The Minister for Environment, Science and Technology has said illegal mining should not be treated as solely an environmental issue. She is right. It is a water bill, a food bill, a health bill and a power bill.

And the people who pay those bills are rarely the people who sold the gold.

So the question is not only how much gold Ghana exports.

It is how much of each gold dollar is still at home after the bills are paid.

Ghana has already laid the foundations to answer it.

GoldBod is procuring a track-and-trace system to verify where gold comes from, in line with OECD guidelines, with the tender due to close this year.

A formalisation and financing programme with the University of Mines and Technology is planned for next year.

Small-scale miners’ associations have welcomed the Responsible Cooperative Mining Scheme, which offers unlicensed miners a lawful path.

Each of these steps creates records. Set the records side by side, and the big picture appears.

Picture three columns for every mining district. The first shows what the gold earned.

The second shows what stayed at home, in wages, local purchases and royalties.

The third shows what it cost in water treatment, clinic visits, lost crops and damaged pipes and roads.

When the third column sits beside the first, choices become clearer.

A district where the bills are small needs one kind of help.

A district where cleaning the river costs more than the gold earned needs another.

Buyers of gold on world markets increasingly ask where it came from and how it was mined.

A district record that shows gold, wages and bills together is exactly the kind of evidence that helps Ghanaian gold earn a premium rather than a discount.

The three columns serve the Sustainable Development Goals directly: clean water (Goal 6), good health (Goal 3) and healthy land (Goal 15), alongside the decent jobs that small-scale mining already provides.

At the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, here in Accra, we are building an open method for setting these columns side by side, so Ghana’s own institutions and universities can run it on their own numbers.

Ghana has shown Africa how to earn from small-scale gold. It can now show Africa how to count what that gold truly keeps.

The writer is Director of the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), Accra.

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