Beneath the Suface: The Human Cost of ‘Galamsey’ in Ghana

“I don’t have to eat, but their lives have to be better,” says Abraham. For years, he worked in Ghana’s illegal gold mines to support his younger siblings, not out of ambition, but necessity.

Across Ghana, young men and women are drawn into galamsey, the country’s informal and often illegal gold mining economy. It is dangerous work, carried out in unstable pits with little protection, yet for many it offers the only viable source of income in the absence of jobs or opportunity.

The consequences reach far beyond the mines themselves. Teenage girls leave school to become ‘galamsey girlfriends’, often facing early pregnancies, while toxic chemicals used to extract gold seep into rivers and farmland, contaminating water sources and damaging entire ecosystems.

For those who work the pits, risk is not just accepted, it is rationalised. “God is here,” says Patrick, a manager at a small-scale mining site. “If you go there, you see God. Physically, God is not here. He does wonderful things under the ground. So if you go there, you see him, the man is very powerful. We don’t joke with him.”

For Abraham, it was never really a choice. “It wasn’t just about making money,” he tells me. “It was survival. That money paid for my school fees, and I helped my younger siblings go to school too. Without it, we would have had nothing.”

He recalls long days underground without proper safety equipment or rest, but insists the alternative was worse. “If I’d stopped, how would I survive? There are no jobs.”

He remains sceptical of government and NGO efforts to shut down illegal mining. “The truth is, it won’t work, not unless they give the youth something else. You can’t just take away the only way we have to eat and expect us to stop. Until there are real alternatives, people will keep going back into the pits.”

This is the human reality behind a national crisis, one where immediate survival continues to outweigh long-term consequences.