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By Seth J. Bokpe & Kwaku Krobea Asante of The Fourth Estate, with Alexander Abdelilah and Anouk Aflalo Doré of Forbidden Stories and Ayushi Kar of The Reporters’ Collective
On a sunny day in July, two men walked into a tiny office in Dawusaso, a predominantly farming community in the Amansie West District in the Ashanti Region.
One of them, shirtless and in large rubber boots caked with mud, dug into his pocket and pulled out a material wrapped in a polythene bag and handed it over to a man sitting behind his desk in the sparsely furnished 10‑square‑meter room.
The plastic bags contain gold nuggets, which were laid on the buyer, John’s desk. He weighed and offered them a price. They accepted without a word, seizing the bundle of bills he handed them, and left.
The transaction took no more than a few minutes, with no questions asked and no documents exchanged.
“Sometimes, the origin of the gold is not legitimate, so you don’t ask about it,” John said, explaining that he deals with “10 to 20 miners per week.”
How much artisanal gold enters the commercial circuit like John’s does, without any traceability? In the absence of reliable figures, SWISSAID, a Swiss NGO, estimates that 30 to 50% of Ghana’s gold production comes from small artisanal operations like those John deals with.
According to interviews The Fourth Estate and Forbidden Stories conducted with actors in the sector, at least half of the mining operations in the area are entirely illegal, meaning they do not have the necessary licenses from authorities.
The team sought to verify this information and assess the true extent of these illegal mines. We identified the land footprint left by mining operations in Western, Central, Western North and Ashanti regions— the epicentre of the gold rush. Then we compared it to the GPS data from the Mineral Commission’s granted concessions. Observing the territory from satellite imagery, the results proved alarming: more than three-quarters of the identified past or present mining operations were found to be illegal. The devastation covers an area equivalent to 33,000 football fields.
Forest reserves, including Apamprama, Offin Shelterbelt and Oda forest reserves in the Ashanti Region, have been decimated. So have Tano Anwia and Anhwiaso East forest reserves in the Western North Region. In the Central Region, Amenase Forest Reserve has not been spared. Similarly, Neung South, Subri and Bonsa forest reserves have all been under attack by illegal miners.
Although the Akufo-Addo administration declared rivers a no-go area, rivers in these regions were part of the destruction, just as wildlife has been destroyed in complete illegality.
To identify all areas affected by mining in this region, we relied on 2024 satellite imagery and the artificial intelligence tool Earth Index. The algorithm detects mining activity by recognising distinctive landscape patterns typical of artisanal operations in tropical environments, such as muddy water basins and trenches dug along riverbanks. To refine the results, we then excluded vegetated areas within each detected area and manually added large industrial mining sites.
Under repeated assaults from hundreds of excavators and artisanal miners, the Offin River is now a shadow of its former self. This major waterway, a tributary of the Pra River, carries a muddy, yellowish flow that no longer reflects the sky. The mercury and arsenic that are dumped into it every day — residues of mining activity — as well as the sediments stirred up by the diggers, have destroyed its clarity.
The damage is so severe that President John Dramani Mahama is being pressured to declare illegal gold mining a “national emergency.” The government is stepping up media initiatives to combat the practice, known locally as galamsey, a contraction of “gather and sell.”
Until recently, the tropical forest spanning the Western, Western North, Central and Ashanti regions coexisted with subsistence farming. Today, the ditches dug in search of gold flakes are so numerous that they are visible by satellite. Their proliferation seems to follow the price of gold, which has climbed sharply since the early 2000s. Considered a safe haven by international investors, gold is on the verge of becoming an existential threat to Ghana, due to the pollution of water supplies and the destruction of natural reserves.
Out of Ghana’s 30 million people, it was estimated in 2021 that one million worked in artisanal gold extraction, 4.5 million in related upstream or downstream activities and only about 12,000 in industrial mining. Amid this chaos, organised crime has gradually taken hold. Farmers are evicted to expand mines, gold is trafficked, and money is openly laundered. Violence is omnipresent here — and working as a journalist is very risky.
“I thought they were going to kill us”
Erastus Asare Donkor, an environmental journalist, has been a victim of the rise in organised crime. On Oct. 20, 2024, during a shoot at an illegal mine located in the heart of a forest reserve, he and his crew were beaten by a group of heavily armed men, who forced them to delete their footage. “I thought they were going to kill us,” he told the team, still visibly shaken. A trial is underway against four of his attackers.
Although galamsey is nothing new in Ghana, its scale has grown in recent years.
“Way back in the first term of the current president, in 2014, this illegal mining business started expanding… And then from 2016, when power changed hands, we saw the influx of more Chinese nationals who brought in equipment and money,” Donkor said. In response to this phenomenon, the government has stepped up its initiatives: measures deemed by its critics to be too symbolic or too isolated to be truly effective.
Galamsey has become an extremely dangerous subject for journalists in the country to cover. Since October 2024, about 10 journalists and their teams have suffered abductions, beatings or death threats during their reporting
The risks faced by journalists are commensurate with the rivers of money generated by this business. Ghana is the largest gold producer in Africa and the sixth-largest worldwide. In 2024, gold represented 57% of the country’s merchandise exports, worth nearly 10 billion euros. But this official figure is far from reality. The Swiss NGO SWISSAID calculated that the quantity of gold exported in 2021 from Ghana to the United Arab Emirates alone was 10 times higher than the officially declared amount. According to SWISSAID, 229 tons of gold, worth nearly 10 billion euros, were smuggled out of Ghana between 2019 and 2023.
It’s more than enough to lure fortune seekers, seduced by TikTok videos of miners boasting about their supposed wealth and proudly displaying their weapons. Amid this mad rush for profit, it was only by being escorted by armed guards and taking multiple precautions that the team was able to report on the ground in July. There, gold refiners, buyers and producers disclosed their illegal practices, often on condition of anonymity and away from prying eyes.
The team managed to reconstruct an entire chain of illegal gold laundering, from the trenches of an artisanal mine in the Ashanti region all the way to India, passing through a slew of intermediaries. Despite numerous high-profile police operations, the gold fever shows no signs of abating. The price of gold has just broken new records on the markets, exceeding $4,000 — more than 3,400 euros — per ounce.
Fully anonymous transactions
To understand how the gold that nearly cost Erastus Donkor his life gets to its destination, one must travel several hours by dirt road from Kumasi, through a tropical forest scattered with craters dug by galamsey miners. The first link in the gold chain, a local buyer, is based in the small village of Dawusaso, the closest town to the illegal site in question.
Along the road, gold has taken over everything, including some police posts adorned with advertisements for local refineries. It is not uncommon for totally illegal artisanal mines to spill over to the roadside, just a few dozen meters from officers on duty.
President Mahama makes numerous promises
President Mahama’s government is making numerous promises to retain foreign investors frightened by the explosion of criminal practices in the gold sector. Among them: the revision of license allocations, the centralisation of exports via a new office, the GoldBod, and increased police operations.
Faced with the extent of illegality revealed by our analysis, neither the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources nor GoldBod responded.
Between late March and early August, the team recorded 26 police operations against illegal mines. In total, 306 arrests were made during these raids. In this context, the voices of legal artisanal miners struggle to be heard — something Michael Kwadwo Peprah knows all too well. “I ask every person who sells me gold where it comes from,” said Peprah, the head of an association of artisanal miners.
A few days before meeting with the team, the police arrested him during an anti‑galamsey operation, accusing him of obstructing the arrest of illegal miners in the middle of a forest reserve. He criticises the authorities for acting too brutally, fearing “unauthorised seizures, with individuals impersonating security agents to extort money from miners.” Without being able to provide further details, Peprah hopes that Ghana will be able “to guarantee the traceability of gold through a software” that is due to be launched by the end of the year.
For now, police efforts do not seem to be making a dent, and for many professionals, gold from Ghana still smells like trouble.
“Are we seeing a meaningful appetite to actually engage with the rules set out by the London Bullion Market Association, OECD and the likes? We don’t think that the current administration is complying, so we’ve had to walk away,” said an expert from a large U.S. intermediary in gold purchase, speaking on condition of anonymity.
This view is shared by Alan, who works as a consultant in the artisanal mining sector in Ghana. “If I told you that by the end of the year, or even next year, everything will be transformed, that would be a lie. It will take time. It will take effort,” he said.
Not everyone has the same reservations. Chinese nationals, for example, are regularly singled out because of their involvement in illegal gold production. But John, the buyer in the small village of Dawusaso, knows other key players in this clandestine business.
“I sell the gold to Indian traders in Kumasi. Not in a shop: in a house without any signs. They don’t ask me where the gold comes from … and I don’t know their names,” he said.
On-site checks confirm that the location does indeed have equipment for refining gold. Kumasi has become a hub for the precious metal, which is bought there for cash before being redirected to the capital of Accra and then exported across the world — including Southeast Asia.
