Some of the gold bought for export from Ghana’s artisanal and small-scale market can no longer leave the country as raw metal. From 1 September 2026, the Ghana Gold Board will only process an export request after that gold has been refined inside Ghana, the refining bill has been settled, and the usual assay and export checks have been met.
The people covered are a specific group of licensed buyers known as self-financing aggregators: traders who buy gold with their own money rather than with GoldBod’s funds. Their approved trading partners, called offtakers in the notice, are covered too. Large industrial mines are outside this rule.
The notice also answers who pays. The refining charge “shall be borne by the Self-Financing Aggregator or the approved Offtaker in accordance with their commercial arrangements,” and it has to be paid before the refined gold is exported. In plain terms, the private parties to the trade carry the cost, not GoldBod. The notice does not say how much refining will cost, or how the charge should be worked out.
GoldBod’s Compliance Directorate issued the directive on 24 August 2026 under the Ghana Gold Board Act, 2025 (Act 1140). Aggregators had until 31 August to amend existing offtake contracts so they include the refining condition. GoldBod may ask for proof of those changes at any time. Trying to export unrefined gold of this kind can cost a buyer its export approvals or even its licence.
The group is large enough to matter, but it is not the whole gold market. As of 31 May 2026, 67 of GoldBod’s 1,184 licensed gold buyers held self-financing aggregator licences, Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Nyarko Ampem told Parliament in June. He also said GoldBod itself bought 135.843 tonnes of gold between January 2025 and May 2026, almost all of it from the artisanal and small-scale sector. Those were the Board’s own purchases. Neither of the recent compliance notices says what share of Ghana’s exports moves through the aggregator channel.
Where the gold must be refined
The notice says refining must happen at a refinery “approved or designated by the GoldBod.” The Board keeps the right to decide which plant handles a shipment and to issue further operating rules. It names no refinery in the notice itself.
GoldBod has announced two refining deals of its own. It signed with Gold Coast Refinery in Accra in January 2026, with work under that deal beginning in February, and with Royal Ghana Gold Refinery on 25 May. Each deal lets GoldBod supply up to one tonne of gold a week.
Both deals are for gold GoldBod supplies. Gold that a self-financing aggregator buys with its own money is a different channel. Neither compliance notice says how much refining capacity is set aside for that channel, or on what terms. No such allocation was found in the GoldBod notices, releases and refinery-deal reports reviewed for this article as of 1 September 2026.
What is on the record is stated capacity, not measured output. Gold Coast Refinery’s executive chairman, Dr Said Deraz, said in February that the plant can process up to two tonnes a week while the GoldBod deal provided for one tonne. GoldBod’s chief executive, Sammy Gyamfi, said the same month that the weekly volume can rise if the plant’s capacity grows. Neither statement measures what the plant currently processes, and neither describes capacity reserved for aggregator-owned gold.
The cost the industry is already talking about
The Ghana Chamber of Mines supports the policy direction and says the cost needs managing. Its chief executive, Dr Ken Ashigbey, told JoyNews’ PM Express on 26 August that “when you want to do this local content, it comes with some cost,” and that “government needs to put its skin in the game.” He called for a review of taxes and levies on refining, investment in cheaper refining technology, and lower power costs for plants he described as critical. He was talking about local processing across the industry, including costs that already fall on large-scale miners, not only about this aggregator notice.
The refining step also sits inside a longer ambition. GoldBod wants at least one Ghanaian refinery to hold London Bullion Market Association accreditation by 2030. That accreditation is the LBMA’s Good Delivery standard for bars traded on the global over-the-counter market. The LBMA itself says Ghana’s government wants a Good Delivery refiner in the country, and that Rand Refinery of South Africa is helping Gold Coast Refinery prepare a possible application. Ruth Crowell, the LBMA’s chief executive, said in February that Rand shares the aim of seeing Gold Coast apply.
A second GoldBod notice, issued on 17 August, took effect on the same day as the refining rule. It makes X-ray fluorescence (XRF) — a scan that measures what the metal is made of without destroying it — the standard way to judge the purity of gold bought by GoldBod and its licensed buyers. The older water-density method is no longer the final word. If a buyer cannot use XRF for genuine operational reasons, a water-density reading counts only as a guide and the gold must be bought at a purity discount of at least 0.5 per cent. GoldBod’s own XRF test then sets the final purity and payment.
Two practical checks matter as the rule beds in. The first is whether GoldBod names the refineries that will handle aggregator-owned gold and publishes what refining will cost. The second is whether export approvals for the 67 licensed buyers in this group keep moving at their earlier pace now that a refining step, and a private charge, sits in front of every shipment.