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The numbers are stark, artisanal and small-scale mining accounted for approximately 52% of Ghana’s gold output in 2025 yet the sector contributed less than 2% of the mining industry’s total tax revenue to the state. Ghana’s Chamber of Mines has put those figures on the table at the 2026 West African Mining and Power Expo and the implication is clear: Ghana’s gold economy has a formalisation problem that is costing the country enormous public revenue.
Chamber President Michael Edem Akafia and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Ashigbey attributed the disparity to the sector’s largely informal operations, which limit tracking, formalisation and tax compliance. Their call is not to suppress artisanal mining which supports millions of livelihoods but to bring more operators into the formal economy in ways that improve revenue mobilisation without undermining the communities that depend on the sector.
The scale of the untapped fiscal opportunity is significant. If even a fraction of the informal sector’s production were brought within the tax net at rates comparable to large-scale mining, the contribution to Ghana’s national revenue would be transformative. The challenge is designing a formalisation pathway that is accessible, incentivised and enforced consistently enough to change behaviour at scale.
