The government has announced new strategies to tackle Ghana’s worsening environmental challenges, particularly illegal mining, also known as galamsey, with a focus on registering small-scale miners into cooperatives to improve monitoring and enforcement.
Speaking to journalists at the ESG and Sustainability Summit in Accra on September 1, 2025, the Chief Executive Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Professor Nana Ama Klutse, stressed that environmental concerns such as illegal mining demand collective action from all citizens.
“The environmental issues we know in Ghana are huge, and they call for all of us to get involved,” she said.
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According to her, while previous enforcement approaches were ineffective, the EPA and the Ministry of Environment are revising their strategies to deliver better results.
“The enforcement is not weak. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Ministry of Environment are working hard on new strategies. The strategies in the past didn’t work, so we are restructuring them to make enforcement more effective, particularly through cooperatives,” she explained.
On illegal mining, she revealed that the government is rolling out a system to formally register and track small-scale miners through associations and cooperatives.
“Especially for illegal mining, we are putting them together as small-scale miners’ associations and working with them in cooperatives, putting them on record. Once we have them registered with the EPA, we can trace them and know exactly where they are operating,” she said.
The registration process, she noted, will allow authorities to identify miners by name and location of operation, making regulation and accountability easier.
This initiative forms part of the government’s renewed efforts to protect Ghana’s environment while ensuring that small-scale mining activities are properly regulated.
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