Ghana’s mining sector has entered a new regulatory phase following Cabinet’s endorsement of the Minerals and Mining (Royalties) Regulations, 2025 (L.I. 2517), which introduces a sliding-scale royalty payment structure designed to capture higher government revenue during commodity price booms while easing the burden on companies during downturns.
Lands and Natural Resources Minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah noted at the Government Accountability Series that the “self-adjusting mechanism offers greater predictability to investors than a rigid fixed rate vulnerable to low-price cycles.”
The regulation forms part of a broader legislative overhaul. Cabinet has also approved a revised Minerals and Mining Policy, replacing the 2014 framework, aimed at deepening local content and tightening enforcement against illegal mining. Separately, the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703), in force for two decades, has been reviewed and endorsed by Cabinet for transmission to Parliament.
The revised bill introduces district mining committees as the entry point for licensing, creates a medium-scale mining category, replaces the reconnaissance and prospecting licence with a five-year exploration licence, caps mining leases at 20 years, and mandates community development agreements as a condition of every lease.
The government’s local content push was anchored by the maiden Mining Local Content Summit, held in Takoradi in February and launched by President Mahama. The minister said the vision is to build an industry where Ghanaians are “not merely participants, but owners, investors, innovators, and manufacturers,” and warned that the government “will not condone fronting or any arrangement that undermines the spirit and objectives” of the local content agenda.
Enforcement against illegal mining, or galamsey, has remained a central priority. The National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat conducted 200 operations across 53 districts in six endemic regions between January and June, recording an 84.1 percent strike rate.
The operations led to 207 arrests, comprising 161 Ghanaians and 46 foreign nationals, the seizure or immobilisation of 168 excavators, and the recovery of 112 pump-action rifles alongside more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, handed to the Ministry of the Interior for destruction. Water body protection was reinforced through the deployment of 452 additional Blue Water Guards, raising total personnel across eight regions to 2,069.
The Responsible Cooperative Mining and Skills Development Programme registered more than 9,000 small-scale miners and 700 cooperatives across eight mining regions. The Ghana Geological Survey Authority has laid seven regulations before Parliament to operationalise Act 928, and has completed a modernisation of the National Seismic Network, restoring monitoring capacity for the first time since 2015.
The minister declared that “the era of impunity is over” and pledged that the government would “continue to pursue every individual, every financier, and every criminal syndicate that profits from the destruction of our environment,” with the law “applied without fear or favour.”
