Ghana produced nearly six million ounces of gold in 2025 — more than the United States, which yielded roughly 160 tonnes — and earned approximately $20 billion from gold exports, nearly double the $10.3 billion recorded in 2024. Gold's share of Ghana's record $31.1 billion in merchandise exports was the largest of any commodity, and with bullion trading at around $4,468 per ounce as of September 4, the momentum has carried into 2026. That windfall has given Accra both the leverage and the urgency to act.
Since September 1, the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) — established under the Ghana Gold Board Act, 2025 — has required Self-Financing Aggregators to refine gold doré inside Ghana before shipping it to approved offtakers abroad, according to Business Insider Africa. The rule was gazetted on August 24. Export applications are now processed only after local refining and other regulatory conditions are satisfied. Exporters who skip the step face refusal or suspension of export approvals, licence revocation, and further administrative sanctions.
The domestic refining infrastructure is thin but growing. Ghana has four licensed gold refineries, including Gold Coast Refinery — capacity up to two tonnes per week — and Royal Ghana Gold Refinery, which can process roughly 400 kilogrammes a day. GoldBod is simultaneously securing 30% of large-scale gold output for strategic reserves and local refining, and reported $1.315 billion in foreign-exchange earnings from artisanal and small-scale gold operations in August alone. Clement Edem Asare Morjah, CEO of United Gold International Limited, told Al Jazeera that refining margins historically lost to foreign processors represent the core of what the policy seeks to recover: decades of value shipped raw have now been made a policy target.
The statistical case for the policy is stark. A Swissaid study found that between 2019 and 2023, Ghana's reported gold exports fell roughly 229 metric tonnes — worth an estimated $11.4 billion — short of what trading partners recorded receiving, with Dubai emerging as the dominant gap destination. Ghana's government had already moved in February 2025 to redirect approximately 127 metric tonnes of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) gold into official channels, with Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson telling Parliament that GoldBod would be required to buy at least 2.45 tonnes of ASM gold per week, targeting an annual inflow above $20 billion.
Zambia is watching closely and copying the playbook. State-controlled ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc CEO Kakenenwa Muyangwa told Business Insider Africa that formalizing Zambia's artisanal sector — modelled explicitly on Ghana's approach — could unlock $1.8 billion in value. The gap Zambia is trying to close is extraordinary: the country's central bank put 2023 gold exports at under $128 million, while the UAE alone reported importing nearly $1.8 billion worth of Zambian gold that year, with Hong Kong adding another $108 million. ZCCM has already partnered with Mining Mineral Resources SAS to buy gold from artisanal miners in North-Western Province and operates a parallel model through Kamunshinshi Mineral Resources. Muyangwa said Zambia could scale from its 2025 output of 127,000 ounces to several hundred thousand ounces annually once the informal sector is absorbed.
While producer-governments tighten control over supply chains, the world's third-largest gold miner is navigating its own turbulence. Barrick Gold — with major African assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kibali), Mali (Loulo-Gounkoto), Tanzania (North Mara and Bulyanhulu), and Zambia (Lumwana) — has delayed the planned public listing of its North American gold business to 2026, according to Business Insider Africa. The delay, confirmed by Barrick's CEO on an August 10 earnings call, follows pushback from major shareholders against Chairman John Thornton's separation plan; at least one investor has publicly called for Thornton's resignation. Goldman Sachs is working with Barrick on the IPO, and the company is courting additional banks. A side deal struck with Newmont — granting it a stake in a Nevada gold project in exchange for IPO backing — triggered a sharp share price drop, with investors viewing the terms as underwhelming. Despite Barrick's US-listed shares rising 22% in August on safe-haven gold demand, the stock is essentially flat for the year at a market cap of roughly $72 billion.
Barrick's Africa operations are consequential enough to move country-level numbers. Its nine-month standoff with Mali's military government — during which General Assimi Goïta's administration seized approximately three metric tonnes of gold valued at roughly $400 million and placed Loulo-Gounkoto under provisional administration — reshuffled Mali's producer rankings: B2Gold overtook Barrick as Mali's top gold producer in 2025 before the dispute was resolved and operations resumed. In Zambia, Barrick has committed around $2 billion to expand the Lumwana copper mine's Super Pit, targeting a production jump from 130,000 to 240,000 tonnes of copper annually by 2028. Lumwana has already contributed more than $3.7 billion to Zambia's economy since 2019, including $887 million in 2024 through wages, taxes, royalties, and local procurement.
Why it matters: Ghana's mandatory refining rule, Zambia's formalization drive, and Mali's aggressive resource nationalism are not isolated policy experiments — they are converging expressions of the same calculation: at $4,400-plus per ounce, the cost of exporting raw gold rather than refined metal is no longer politically or economically defensible. For operators, the compliance bar is rising fast; for investors, the jurisdictional risk premium on African gold assets has become impossible to ignore.