How mining licences work in Ghana

You cannot understand illegal mining without understanding legal mining. Ghana has a licensing framework, a nationality rule, and a set of gaps between the two that most galamsey operations live inside.

Who owns the minerals

Under Ghanaian law, minerals in their natural state are vested in the President in trust for the people of Ghana. Nobody owns the gold under their land. What can be granted is a right to search for or extract it, on terms set by the State.

The governing statute is the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703), as amended — notably by Act 995 (2019), which stiffened penalties for illegal mining. The Minerals Commission administers licences; the Environmental Protection Agency issues the separate environmental permit; and the sector minister has approval powers over the more significant grants.

Owning the land is not owning the gold. That single fact drives most land disputes in Ghana's mining districts.

The four rights you can hold

Right	What it permits	Who may hold it
Reconnaissance licence	Broad, non-invasive searching — aerial and geological survey. No drilling or excavation.	Citizens or companies, including foreign
Prospecting licence	Detailed investigation, including drilling, to establish whether a deposit is commercially viable. Not production.	Citizens or companies, including foreign
Mining lease	Full commercial extraction and disposal of minerals. This is large-scale mining.	Citizens or companies, including foreign
Small-scale mining licence	Extraction within a limited, designated area using restricted methods.	Ghanaian citizens only

What a legal small-scale operation requires

A licence alone is not enough. A compliant small-scale operation needs, at minimum:

1. A small-scale mining licence from the Minerals Commission, covering a defined and bounded area
2. An environmental permit from the EPA
3. Land access agreed with the landowner or stool, with compensation where applicable
4. Operation within the stated methods — the licence governs how you mine, not only where
5. Reclamation obligations, requiring the site to be restored

Each of those is a separate point of failure, and each failure is a different offence with a different enforcement route. “Illegal mining” is not one thing.

Where the gaps are

1. Fronting

A licence is issued to a Ghanaian citizen. The equipment, financing and day-to-day control belong to someone who could not legally hold it. On paper the site is compliant; in practice the nationality rule has been circumvented entirely.

This is difficult to prosecute because it requires proving control rather than ownership — and control is not recorded anywhere.

2. Boundary drift

A licence covers a defined area. Mining outside that boundary is illegal, but from a distance it looks identical to mining inside it. Without georeferenced monitoring, the offence is invisible.

3. Method breach

A small-scale licence contemplates limited methods and equipment. Sites operating with heavy excavators and river dredging platforms have exceeded what the licence permits even where the licence itself is valid.

4. The permit-without-compliance gap

An EPA permit sets conditions — on tailings, water, reclamation. Holding the permit and meeting its conditions are different things, and only the first is a document anyone checks at a roadblock.

5. Reclamation that never happens

Restoration obligations survive the end of mining. Abandoned pits across Ghana's mining districts are evidence of how often they are enforced.

What to watch

• Licence register transparency. A searchable public register of small-scale licences, with holder names and mapped boundaries, would make fronting and boundary drift far harder to hide.
• Prosecutions under Act 995 — particularly against equipment owners and financiers rather than diggers.
• EPA enforcement notices, which identify permitted sites in breach.
• Reclamation bonds — whether they are posted, and whether they are ever called in.
• Licences granted inside or adjacent to forest reserves.