On July 30, 2026, at the EMY Africa – Africa Rising Symposium in London, the CEO of Ghana’s Gold Board (GoldBod), Sammy Gyamfi, presented the institution’s reforms as a model for how African states can retain more value from their mineral wealth. He also announced that GoldBod will introduce gold-backed tokenised investment assets, intended to widen African ownership of mineral resources.
GoldBod was created under the 2025 Gold Board Act, which gives it exclusive authority to buy, assay and export gold and other precious minerals in Ghana. Backed by $279 million in state seed capital, the institution buys a minimum of three tons of gold per week, primarily to generate foreign exchange and support Bank of Ghana reserve accumulation. Less than a year after its establishment, delegations from Sierra Leone, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Burundi have visited Ghana to study the model, according to GoldBod. The announcement lands alongside a regional trend toward tighter state control over mineral value chains, including Guinea’s own ban on raw gold exports.
What the London remarks reveal is a broader shift in how African governments frame resource sovereignty: less as export volume, more as retained value, financing capacity and ownership structure. The tokenisation plan, if it materialises, would combine that resource-sovereignty push with a fintech mechanism aimed at retail and diaspora investors, an approach with no clear precedent at this scale on the continent. At this stage, however, the announcement remains a stated intention. No regulatory framework, custody arrangement, timeline or backing structure for the tokenised assets has been disclosed.
What to watch next is whether GoldBod publishes concrete specifications for the product, and whether the delegations now studying Ghana’s model result in comparable institutions elsewhere in West Africa, a development that would carry direct implications for how gold flows and pricing power are organised regionally.