Data compiled by the Ghana Chamber of Mines indicates that the country’s gold production has increased.
It rose 8.3% to 4 million ounces in 2023 compared to 3.7 million ounces the previous year.
The increase serves as the country’s highest output since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Production growth was driven primarily by the expansion in the output of small-scale miners, which was sufficient to offset the decline in the output of the large-scale subsectors.
Gold production attributable to the large-scale subsector declined from 3.1 million ounces in 2022 to 2.9 million ounces in 2023, a downturn of 4.9%.
Conversely, the comparable outturn for the small-scale sub-sector grew by 70.6 per cent, from 0.66 million ounces to 1.1 million ounces in the corresponding period.
Gold output is forecast to reach between 4.3 and 4.5 million ounces in 2024.
New projects like Newmont’s Ahafo North and Cardinal Resource’s Namdini Gold Mine will contribute to this growth.
Manganese production is also expected to increase to 5 million tonnes, bauxite to between 1.2 million and 1.5 million tonnes, and diamond exports to about 220,000 to 250,000 carats.
Gold production
Ghana is home to several precious minerals.
Over the past decades, the mineral sector has contributed to 37% of the exports of the country and accounted for 8.4% of the GDP of the country in 2011 from 6.1% the previous year (Ghana Statistical Service, 2010).
In recent years, gold production, for instance, has been observed to increase substantially from 20,000 ounces in 1990 to 1.6 million ounces in 2016 (Ofosu et al., 2020).
The increase in gold mining in Ghana has also seen some significant improvement in the livelihoods of communities where gold mining is in operation (Ofosu et al., 2020).
However, illegal mining (both foreign and Ghanaian nationals) continues unabated in the country despite government efforts to curb these activities.