Kofi Ahovi

  The Minerals Commission is developing ‌minimum wage and tender benchmarks for contract mining firms, seeking to curb aggressive underbidding as the country pushes miners to outsource more operations to local contractors, a senior official said on Thursday. Ghana, Africa's top gold producer, in January 2025 ordered miners to shift surface operations — blasting, loading, hauling, and dumping — to Ghanaian-owned contractors, and underground operations to joint ventures with at least 50% local ownership by December 31, or face sanctions. ⁠ It is consistent with a broader push by Africa's resource-rich nations to try to retain more value from ​their mineral wealth. But Ghanaian mine workers have spoken out against the directive, saying contractors offer lower pay and weaker ​job security. In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Ben Birch-Mensah, director of local content at the Minerals Commission, the national regulator, said officials wanted to ensure that workers' pay an...

 The Minerals Commission has donated GH¢2 million to the Appiatse Support Fund. The fund was set up by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor, on the directive of the President to help restore livelihoods and reconstruct the Appiatse community, which was ravaged by an explosion on January 20 this year. The Chairperson of the Board of the Minerals Commission, Barbara Oteng Gyasi, presented a dummy cheque for the amount to the Chairperson of the Appiatse Support Fund, Rev. Dr. Joyce Rosalind Aryee, in Accra last Thursday. Gyasi said the donation was to support and ensure the speedy reconstruction of the Appiatse community. The people are going through hard times, and we cannot look on without helping. We made this donation to ease the work of the committee," she said. She reiterated that as a regulator of the mining industry, the commission would do all things possible to facilitate ongoing investigation into the causes of the explosion that claimed at least...

The Minerals Commission has held a two-day capacity building workshop for a cross section of media professionals in the bid for them to have a general overview of the minerals and mining operations in the country. The training workshop forms part of the commission’s drive to engage journalists on the emerging trends in the mineral and mining space as well as the challenges pertaining in the sector and the role of the media to report accurately. Participants were taken through topics such as Overview of the Mineral Commission Act, 1994 (ACT 450) and 2006 (Act 703), Types of Mineral Rights and Licensing Acquisition Procedure, Mining life cycle (stages of mining) and Statutory Reporting. Read also: Air Malta to start operations in Ghana this year The rest are Small Scale Mining in Ghana, Community Mining Scheme, Act 995-Offences under the Minerals and Mining Act 703, Support Service and Local Content, Fiscal Regime in Ghana and Compensation and Settlement. In an address, the Chief Execut...