The Ghana Gold Board, a state-owned corporation otherwise called GoldBod for short, is set to roll out a scholarship scheme for children in mining communities across the country.
The acting managing director of the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC) Ltd, Sammy Gyamfi, disclosed this initiative at a stakeholder consultation meeting held in Bolgatanga on Wednesday, 26 March 2025, in the Upper East regional capital, Bolgatanga.
“Now that GoldBod is coming, you will now have a [restructured] state agency that is going to be responsible for buying the gold. So, the state is going to get some profits, some revenue, from this. And when we get the revenue, not only should we use the revenue to support miners but we also need to allocate money for corporate social responsibility, and that is in our bill and we are going to do that.
“Cocobod (Ghana Cocoa Board) does Cocoa Scholarships. GoldBod will do Gold Scholarships to children in mining communities for them not to go and study Religious and Moral Education. We want them to go to UMaT (University of Mines and Technology) to go and study Minerals Engineering, Metallurgy, so that they can come and help their communities,” he said.
The consultation meeting was meant to discuss the objectives and the functions of GoldBod. It brought together several stakeholders including small-scale miners, traditional authorities, members of civil society groups, officials of state agencies and representatives of youth-focused organisations.
“So, if your child passes and wants admission to UMaT and they qualify, we will give those children scholarships, and we will even give them scholarships to go and further their education in Australia and other advanced jurisdictions. Scholarship is very dear to us under our corporate social responsibility policy,” added the PMMC’s acting managing director.
About GoldBod
GoldBod was initiated by the Mahama administration to help put an end to the billions of cedis Ghana is losing annually through gold smuggling, the black market, chaos in the gold-purchasing sector, low royalty payment and tax evasion.
In 2022 alone, 60 tonnes of gold worth $1.2 billion were smuggled out of Ghana from small-scale mining, according to Ghana’s minister of finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson.
Again, in 2024, Ghana exported an amount of gold worth almost $5billion from legal small-scale mining. But the value of the gold smuggled out of the country from small-scale mining in that year alone was almost $10 billion.
Ghana is also not realising the full benefit of its gold resources because PMMC is not the only agency that has the mandate to purchase gold. Other entities like the Bank of Ghana and the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) have a similar mandate.
Some private aggregators as well as Ghanaians and foreigners with export licences purchase gold, too, under such initiatives as “gold for forex,” “gold for reserves”, “gold for oil” and “gold for cash” among others.
The gold-purchasing system lacks coordination and this disarray has encouraged the gold-smuggling business and the gold black market to flourish. This is taking a heavy toll on the economy and it is a major reason Ghana’s currency, the cedi, is drastically losing its value against the dollar.
The Mahama administration established GoldBod as part of a broader agenda to revive and reset the economy. As a state corporation, GoldBod has the mandate to take over the gold-purchasing system, to regulate and to restructure it. It will function as the sole buyer of gold from legal small-scale miners through licensed aggregators and local traders.
To give it the necessary legal backing to operate, a proposal called the “GoldBod Bill” was laid before Parliament and was approved last week. With that parliamentary approval, the agency now has the legal rights as the sole assayer, seller and exporter of the mineral resource purchased from small-scale miners.
It will not take over the regulatory mandate of the Minerals Commission over the small-scale mining sector. But it will replace PMMC as an enhanced version and operate with subsidiaries including a national security taskforce whose duty is to help curtail gold smuggling and get rid of the gold black market.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
