Ghana’s Gold Board, known as GoldBod, has barred Self-Financing Aggregators from exporting artisanal gold doré in unrefined form, effective September 1 (Al Jazeera). The directive, issued on August 24, requires that gold purchased under arrangements with approved offtakers be refined inside Ghana before an export application can be considered. Aggregators had until August 31 to amend their existing offtake contracts to reflect the new condition (Rio Times, citing GoldBod). GoldBod has said noncompliance could lead to suspension or revocation of licences.
GoldBod is the state-owned body established under the Ghana Gold Board Act of 2025, holding exclusive rights to buy, sell, assay, value and export artisanal gold since it began operations that year. It exported 104 metric tonnes of artisanal gold in 2025 and is on course to match or exceed that volume in 2026 (Rio Times). The board has also published a foreign-exchange target of 1.4 billion dollars for September alone, split between commercial banks and the Bank of Ghana, under the Ghana Accelerated National Reserve Accumulation Policy that took formal effect on August 3. That figure is the board’s own projection, not an independently audited outturn.
The rule runs into a capacity problem. Ghana has four licensed gold refineries: Gold Coast Refinery, Sahara Royal Gold Refinery, IPM KAL Ghana, and Royal Ghana Gold Refinery. GoldBod has so far announced supply contracts with only two of them, Gold Coast in January and Royal Ghana Gold in May. None of the four currently holds accreditation on the London Bullion Market Association’s Good Delivery List, the benchmark most international buyers use to accept gold without additional verification (Rio Times). Ghana’s Chamber of Mines has welcomed the directive as a positive step for retaining value domestically, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting, which cited comments from GoldBod’s leadership during a visit to Gold Coast Refinery on September 4.
The policy sits inside a wider regional pattern. Guinea barred the export of unrefined gold earlier in 2026 for similar reasons, tying the measure explicitly to job creation and local value capture. Ghana’s move follows the same logic but exposes a specific gap: requiring refining as a condition of export does not by itself solve the question of whether gold refined domestically will be accepted at full value internationally without LBMA accreditation. Aggregators and their offtakers now have to route volume through two refiners with confirmed contracts, which concentrates processing capacity at a moment when the rule requires all artisanal export gold to pass through it.
What to watch next: whether GoldBod adds supply contracts with the two refiners not yet named, whether any Ghanaian refinery secures LBMA Good Delivery accreditation, and whether the September foreign-exchange target of 1.4 billion dollars is met or falls short once the refining bottleneck has had a full month to bind.