Ghana’s Gold Boom Growing Faster Than Its Tax Take

NRGI renews calls for a revenue strategy for small-scale mining, echoing an earlier warning from IFS that rising gold production has yet to deliver a matching fiscal windfall.

Ghana’s booming small-scale gold mining industry is generating increasing volumes of gold, but the government is still struggling to capture a fair share of the wealth being created, according to the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).

NRGI Country Manager Patrick Stephenson has called on the government to strengthen revenue mobilisation from artisanal and small-scale mining, arguing that the sector has become too economically significant to remain weakly integrated into the tax system.

His comments, made at a policy dialogue on the 2025 Mid-Year Budget Review organised by the Tax Justice Coalition-Ghana in Accra, reinforce an earlier concern raised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that Ghana’s rapid growth in small-scale gold production and exports has not translated into significant growth in mineral revenue.

The two interventions point to the same widening gap: Ghana’s small-scale gold business is getting bigger, but the state’s share of the value being created is not keeping pace.

The Gold Is There. Where Is the Revenue?

Stephenson said the debate should move beyond whether small-scale miners are producing enough gold.

“The question is not whether the sector is producing. The question is whether the revenue system is capturing the value being generated within the sector,” he said.

That question is becoming increasingly important as small-scale mining accounts for a larger share of Ghana’s gold production.

For government, the opportunity is significant. If production and exports are rising without a corresponding increase in mineral revenue, then a substantial part of the economic activity is happening without generating an equivalent fiscal return.

This comes at a time when government is under pressure to raise domestic revenue to finance public services without placing additional burdens on already-taxed households and formal businesses.

IFS Raised the Alarm Earlier

The latest NRGI intervention follows a similar warning from the IFS, led by economist Dr Said Boakye.

The institute had urged government to devise a specific strategy to generate revenue from the rapidly expanding small-scale mining sector.

IFS argued that the remarkable increase in gold production and exports by small-scale miners had not produced significant growth in mineral revenue because government had not adequately focused on revenue mobilisation from the sector.

The institute’s position was straightforward: Ghana’s mineral resources belong to the people and are held by the state in trust. The state should therefore receive a fair share of the benefits when those resources are extracted.

NRGI’s latest intervention gives fresh urgency to that argument.

The Informal Sector Is Not Necessarily a Small Business

One of the challenges, according to NRGI, is how Ghana defines informal economic activity.

Stephenson said many operators classified as informal are engaged in substantial commercial activities and generate significant incomes, yet remain outside conventional regulatory and tax frameworks.

That creates a problem for revenue mobilisation.

A mining operation may be considered informal because of its regulatory status, but that does not necessarily mean it is economically small.

As the sector expands, government needs better ways of identifying the operators generating significant economic value and bringing them into a revenue system that is practical enough to encourage compliance.

A Bigger Tax Base Without Another New Tax

For Ghana’s fiscal managers, the small-scale mining sector could offer something increasingly valuable: more revenue from an existing economic activity rather than another tax on businesses and consumers.

NRGI is calling for stronger reporting, better compliance and innovative approaches to revenue collection.

That could involve improving the visibility of production and gold transactions, strengthening reporting systems and creating incentives for operators to enter the formal economy.

The challenge will be to design a system that captures more revenue without driving legitimate miners deeper underground.

The Money Can Also Leave the Country

The revenue concern does not stop at tax collection.

Benedict Doh, National Coordinator of the Tax Justice Coalition-Ghana, warned that illicit financial flows continue to deprive the country of resources that could be invested in infrastructure, education, healthcare and other public services.

That makes transparency across the gold value chain particularly important.

If Ghana cannot adequately track production, sales and the movement of gold-related proceeds, it becomes harder to determine how much economic value is actually being generated and how much should accrue to the state.

The Fiscal Opportunity Ghana Cannot Ignore

Ghana has already built a sizeable gold economy around small-scale mining. The next challenge is ensuring that the state captures a reasonable share of the value.

The renewed call from NRGI, following the earlier IFS warning, suggests growing agreement among fiscal and natural-resource experts that the sector requires a dedicated revenue strategy.

The issue is therefore no longer simply about regulating small-scale miners.

It is about turning Ghana’s growing gold production into sustainable public revenue.

With government facing persistent demands for more money to fund development, leaving a major and expanding source of national wealth largely outside an effective revenue framework is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.