- Temps de lecture: 10 min.
In Ghana, the environment and journalists are the first casualties of the illegal gold rush
Poisoned waterways, destroyed forests and journalists under attack: in Ghana, the gold rush is devastating the environment and threatening the right to information. The explosion of illegal gold mines, fueled by soaring gold prices, feeds the black market and fills the coffers of criminal groups. Conducted in partnership with The Fourth Estate and The Reporters’ Collective, Forbidden Stories’ investigation reveals that some of this clandestine gold, produced under the protection of armed gangs, ends up in India.
Gold miners on the side of the road, south of Kumasi. (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
- An exclusive satellite imagery analysis reveals that more than three-quarters of the areas affected by mines in southwestern Ghana are located outside of legally delegated concessions.
- Illegally mined gold from the country’s small artisanal operations is mixed with legal gold as soon as it leaves the mine.
- A portion of this artisanal gold ends up on the black market and is bought by Indian intermediaries, among others.
- Ghana also officially exports tons of gold with a high risk of illegality to many countries, including India.
By Alexander Abdelilah
Additional reporting by Anouk Aflalo Doré
October 24th, 2025
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.
Not only do the rivers suffer, but so do nearby forests and plantations, razed by excavators. The damage is so severe that Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, elected in December 2024, is being pressured to declare illegal gold mining a “national emergency.” His government is stepping up media initiatives to combat the practice, known locally as galamsey, a contraction of “gather and sell.”
In the southwest of the country, the tropical forest spanning the Western, Central and Ashanti regions coexisted until recently 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 1 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, organized 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, a reporter for the 24-hour news channel JoyNews and a figure in Ghanaian journalism, has been a victim of the rise in organized 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 Forbidden Stories, still visibly shaken. A trial is underway against four of his attackers.
Satellite images of the illegal artisanal gold mine where journalist Erastus Asare Donkor was attacked, in 2015 and then in 2025.
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. Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to continue the work of silenced journalists, visited the region in partnership with The Fourth Estate, a nonprofit investigative media outlet.
An illegal gold buyer shows Forbidden Stories a gold bar he has acquired (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
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 Forbidden Stories 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.
Forbidden Stories 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 Donkor his life gets to its destination, one must travel several hours by dirt road from the large city of 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.
An advertisement for a gold buyer in Wassa Akropong (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories).
Upon arriving in Dawusaso, Forbidden Stories met with John*, who has been living there for four years. Sitting behind his desk, in a sparsely furnished 10‑square‑meter room, he agreed to talk but forbade any filming. “Sometimes, the origin of the gold is not legitimate, so you don’t ask about it,” he said, explaining that he deals with “10 to 20 miners per week.”
During the conversation, two men entered the room. One of them wore large rubber boots caked with mud. Here, only artisanal miners bring their spoils to rural buyers, also called bush buyers. Industrial mine production goes through much more regulated channels. Without delay, they laid a gold nugget on John’s desk, which he weighed and offered them a price for. They accepted without a word, seizing the bundle of bills he handed them, and left. As John had described a few minutes earlier, the transaction took no more than a few minutes, with no questions asked and no documents exchanged.
How much artisanal gold enters the commercial circuit like John’s does, without any traceability? In the absence of reliable figures, Swissaid estimates that 30 to 50% of Ghana’s gold production comes from small artisanal operations like those John deals with. According to interviews Forbidden Stories was able to conduct with actors in the sector, at least half of these operations are entirely illegal, meaning they do not have the necessary licenses from authorities.
An area six times larger than Washington D.C devastated
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 recognizing 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.
Forbidden Stories sought to verifiy this information and assess the true extent of these illegal mines. We identified the land footprint left by mining operations in southwestern Ghana, the epicenter of the gold rush. Then we compared it to the GPS data from the Ghanaian government’s official mining concessions. Observing the territory from above, 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 six times the size of Washington, D.C.. Forests, rivers, and wildlife have been destroyed in complete illegality.
We mapped nearly 150,000 hectares affected by active and abandoned mines in the region.
Some of these mines are located within protected areas.
77.4% of the identified mining operations lie outside the concessions granted by the state : they are illegal
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 centralization 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, Forbidden Stories 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 Forbidden Stories, 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 criticizes the authorities for acting too brutally, fearing “unauthorized 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, Ghanaian gold 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.
A Chinese company operating in the epicenter of gold production in Ghana (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
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. In Ghana, 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.
Indian traders, Ghanaian frontmen
The Indian traders’ method is simple: they buy at a higher price than on the legal market. Kofi*, an unlicensed buyer in the region, estimates that the price difference is nearly 20%, or about 14,000 euros for a kilogram of gold. For discretion, Forbidden Stories met him in his car, on a vacant lot in the suburbs of Kumasi. “On the black market, you can sell to the Chinese or to the Indians. You schedule a meeting over the phone and meet them directly in their homes,” said Kofi, who claims to buy and resell 15 kg of gold per year — the equivalent of 1.66 million euros in value.
Since April 30, 2025, however, foreigners no longer have the right to buy or sell gold on the local market, in order to prevent gold from disappearing without benefiting the state’s coffers. But this new measure is easy to circumvent. “To keep up their business, if it’s a company buying the gold, they’ll put a Ghanaian in front, so as to keep operating,” explained Kodjo*, who owns a legal gold mine in the region and has worked in the sector for three decades.
One example is the company Unique MM, which experienced a highly publicized police raid in late April. Indian traders had been hiding behind a Ghanaian frontman, according to authorities, and the gold purchased from artisanal mines in Kumasi was being illegally shipped to India. Unique MM did not respond to Forbidden Stories’ questions.
A freshly refined nugget of illegal gold, at a refinery in Kumasi (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
India has also been involved in another gold‑trafficking case that made headlines in Ghana recently. This time, it was an Indian company that the authorities caught in their nets. Suspected of having bought 100 kg of gold on the black market in two months, from a Ghanaian intermediary in the country’s southwestern mining basin, the company was severely punished. Its jewelry shop in the capital of Accra was immediately closed, and its directors and presumed associates were arrested or placed on a wanted list, with a hefty reward of 70,000 euros. The lawyers representing the company denied any wrongdoing but did not respond to our questions.
But these rare publicly exposed cases are unlikely to dry up artisanal gold production. Tons of that gold are exported completely legally by GoldBod, the new state authority that centralizes the country’s gold before export to counter trafficking — even if it means laundering gold from illegal mines. During a press conference on Sept. 10, President Mahama himself said that whether the gold was from legal or illegal sources, Ghana should “get the benefit of it.”
It’s worth the risk: between January and August 2025 alone, nearly 67 tons of artisanal gold, representing more than 5 billion euros, were shipped. Compare this to 63 tons of gold, equivalent to nearly 4 billion euros, from industrial mines.
India is the 6th largest importer of this increasingly sought‑after metal. According to commercially available customs data that Forbidden Stories reviewed via Indian experts, no fewer than 13 tons of gold departed from Ghana for the subcontinent between late May and mid‑August 2025. Eight of those tons passed through GoldBod. On some days, such as June 3, 2025, more than 600 kg of gold landed in India.
There was only one buyer for GoldBod: Sovereign Metals Limited, a company from India’s northwestern state of Gujarat, which purchased nearly 730 million euros worth of gold bars. It’s a reflection of the country’s immense thirst for gold, which is prized both as a financial investment and in the form of jewelry for weddings or traditional ceremonies. By permitting the export of illegally mined gold through GoldBod, the Ghanaian government enables traders like Sovereign Metals Limited to acquire the precious metal, which has been effectively laundered of its illicit origins.
Sovereign Metals Limited, which reported revenues of nearly 500 million euros in 2024, is part of a group of companies specialized in precious metals and offering refining, trading and jewelry manufacturing services.
“These are groups that try to control as much of the supply chain as possible, from importation to the sale of jewelry,” explained Marc Ummel from Swissaid. “In general, they sell imported gold mainly on the Indian market in the form of jewelry, and a small portion internationally,” he continued, citing the United Arab Emirates as a popular destination.
At the helm of this bling empire is the Indian Lodhiya family, a dynasty in the sector. The current CEO of Sovereign Metals Limited represents the fourth generation to trade in gold and silver. When asked about the precise origin and legality of the gold sent to India, GoldBod didn’t reply. Same silence from Sovereign Metals Limited, whose website claims “responsible sourcing and ethical business practices.”
*Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of those involved.
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