Ghana will issue no mining licence without a district committee’s recommendation, Lands Minister Armah-Kofi Buah announced Monday while launching the country’s first cooperative mining scheme in the Eastern Region.
The proposal would strip Accra of its near total grip on licensing decisions and hand host communities a formal gatekeeping role. Buah argued that the current system, under which major licence decisions are taken in the capital, shuts out the very communities whose lands, livelihoods and environment carry the consequences. He went further, declaring that no miner will be permitted to operate in a district outside their own without approval at the district level.
For small scale miners, the change would redraw the rules of entry. For chiefs and district assemblies, it offers leverage they have demanded for years as illegal mining, known locally as galamsey, has poisoned rivers and stripped farmland.
The minister spoke at New Abirem in the Akyem Kotoku Traditional Area, where the government launched its maiden Responsible Cooperative Mining Scheme under the Responsible Cooperative Mining and Skills Development Programme (rCOMSDEP). He announced that the Akyem Kotoku cooperative will receive the first Gold Katcha machine, a processing technology that lifts gold recovery rates while cutting waste and environmental damage.
The day did not go entirely to script. Young men dressed in black with red armbands attempted to block Buah and his entourage from the launch, accusing local party leaders of sidelining them in the planning of the initiative, before police and senior officials of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) restored calm. The party’s constituency organiser for Abirem, Frank Owusu Amoah, later insisted the youth support the programme itself and that circulating videos of the confrontation had been misread. The episode points to the scheme’s central test: programmes built on community ownership collapse quickly when communities feel ownership was decided for them.
Buah framed the launch within a five part strategy against illegal mining: public education to turn communities into custodians of their resources, intensified enforcement through the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat (NAIMOS) in forest reserves and along rivers, the licensing reforms anchored by the district committees, reclamation of degraded land and polluted water through efforts including the Blue Water Guards river protection programme, and alternative livelihoods to weaken the economic pull of galamsey. Force alone, he said, cannot win the fight.
The programme carries real weight because of who depends on the sector. Roughly one million people work in artisanal and small scale mining in Ghana, and rCOMSDEP consolidates two earlier interventions, the Community Mining Scheme that formalised operations through community concessions from 2019 and the National Alternative Employment and Livelihood Programme running since 2021.
Traditional authority has lined up behind the scheme. The Paramount Chief of Akyem Kotoku, Oseadeeyo Dr Frimpong Manso IV, called it a timely intervention, pledged his council’s support and urged residents to comply with its rules.
The district committees remain a proposal, and the ministry has not said what legal instrument will create them or when. Until that detail lands, the promise of locally controlled licensing rests on an announcement rather than a law.
