A price too high to pay? Pollution from Ghana’s gold rush sparks maternal health fears
NIMI PRINCEWILL
In a sealed plastic jar, the remains of a fetus with severe birth defects are preserved in formalin for scientific research. The transparent jar, around 70cm tall, sits along the back wall of a pathology lab at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
More than a dozen other fetuses with birth defects sit in jars, on morbid display. None of their mothers, aged 18-39, survived childbirth. The mother of the fetus with the cleft lip was just 20 years old.
According to the team that runs the lab, she had been working at an unlicensed gold mine, eking a living out of what has been described as Ghana’s gold rush – a job which scientists believe could have contributed to the untimely deaths of mother and child.
Of the 15 fetuses being studied here, CNN was told that nine of their deceased mothers, like the 20-year-old, worked in an illegal gold mine. The remainder lived in neighboring mining communities.
When hundreds of people took part in an “environmental prayer walk” in Ghana’s capital Accra in October, the focus had been on the physical dangers and environmental degradation caused by small-scale unlicensed gold mining, known colloquially as “galamsey”.
But in the western part of the country, the boon from gold is feared to also be putting women at risk of maternal deaths, miscarriages and fetal birth defects.
The research in Ghana on the impact of mining pollution on maternal health is nascent. No definitive links have been found yet, but experts are sounding the alarm on what is known so far.
Samreboi, a six-hour drive from the lab in Kumasi, is a town at the heart of Ghana’s sprawling unregulated small-scale gold mining industry. Here, heavy metals such as mercury and chemicals like cyanide are used to process gold from excavated soil; separating the precious metal from its ore.
Toxic wastewater runs from dozens of unregulated mines into the Tano River, a 400km body of water which flows into neighboring Ivory Coast, where it enters the Atlantic Ocean. Locals told CNN that this river once ran clear; it is now a murky brown.
Nursing mother, Diana Agyeiwaa used to drink from the river and eat its fish. But after she developed complications in childbirth last year, Agyeiwaa, 38, began to suspect she may have been poisoned by the water.
Now, she says, she goes nowhere near it, concerned about what it might do to her and her little girl. “I fear for my life,” she said. “I fear if I give that water to her, she will die.”
Agyeiwaa, who works at a local radio station, also suspects that other women and children in her community have been affected by consuming the water. “I met one woman when she delivered a baby; its nose was half. I’ve seen a lot of deformities in babies.”
While Agyeiwaa does not have proof that she or others have been poisoned by these mining pollutants, research has found them to be present above acceptable levels in Ghanaian rivers, and studies have linked toxins such as mercury, lead and cyanide to a range of health risks, including congenital defects.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021 reported that mercury exposure posed “a particular threat to the development of the child in utero and in early life,” adding that eating contaminated fish is a “main source” of exposure in humans.
In the same year, a study of fish in the Tano River found the levels of arsenic and mercury in fish muscles exceeded permissible levels established by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization and the WHO. The researchers noted that “ingestion of fish polluted with high levels of [mercury, arsenic and chromium] is a
A local clinician in Samreboi who asked not to be named for fear of being targeted by miners for speaking out, told CNN that he had delivered “several babies” with birth defects in recent years.
Describing one such delivery the doctor said: “I delivered a baby, and the abdominal wall wasn’t formed enough – you could see the baby’s intestine.” He said fetal deformities started becoming more prevalent five years ago, suggesting it is connected to the rise in illegal mining. “We didn’t use to see a lot of these things until galamsey became very rampant. I don’t think it is a coincidence.”
Professor Paul Sampene Ossei, who runs the lab in Kumasi, is also concerned. The Forensic pathologist has been studying the potential link between the pollution from unregulated small-scale mining and maternal health and told CNN that in samples taken from the 15 deceased mothers and fetuses, heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium were present.
Other experts CNN spoke to explained that the pathologist’s sample size is too small to draw any clear conclusions and noted that accuracy can be difficult when analyzing biological samples. In addition, Ossei’s work is yet to be peer reviewed and published.
However, the 57-year-old scientist told CNN that if unaddressed, galamsey poses an “existential threat” to Ghana. “We are rich in gold, but we cannot allow people to mine it irresponsibly, causing all manner of problems for others. This is an existential threat, and we need to be very mindful about it.
‘Gold is part of our DNA’
A global surge in prices is driving what Martin Ayisi described as “a gold rush” in Ghana, the world’s sixth-largest gold producer. “Gold is everything to us, it’s part of our DNA,”Ayisi, who heads up the country’s Minerals Commission, a government body that regulates its mineral wealth, excitedly told CNN. “Our whole life is tied to gold.”
“Prices have gone through the roof,” he explained from his spacious office in Accra, alluding to the increase in value by roughly 30% so far this year.
The price hike is in part driven by growing demand from central banks in China, India and other countries who are attempting to shore up their gold reserves and reduce their reliance on the US Dollar.
This demand has been good news economically for Ghana. Gold has made up more than half of the west African nation’s total exports so far this year, bringing billions of dollars into an economy that was in crisis just last year.
Approximately 36% of the gold exported in the first half of 2024 was sourced from regulated small-scale mines. The rest, according to the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, came from large-scale mining operations. Ayisi told CNN that the bulk of Ghana’s exported gold was sold to the United Arab Emirates and India.
The Minerals Commission makes a distinction between unregulated, small-scale mining – galamsey – and legal artisanal mining. There is little data about the former, though its impact can be seen across the rural landscape.
However, in September, Ghanaian media quoted Chris Aston, the head of a new bilateral gold program between the UK and Ghana, as saying that “Ghana loses more than $2 billion yearly to gold smuggling.” In 2021 galamsey accounted for “an estimated 60% of Ghana’s mining labor force”.
Though miners make the least in the gold supply chain, illegal mining provides much needed employment. More than a million people, aged below 35, are without jobs, according to Ghana’s Statistical Service.
Rife youth unemployment and the high prices of gold are driving more people into the industry. The number of small-scale gold mining licenses or permits issued by Ghanaian authorities leapt from 12 in 2019 to almost 650 in 2020, according to data from the Minerals Commission.
Mining sites have also proliferated, Ayisi told CNN, with gold now officially sourced from 13 of Ghana’s 16 regions, though he did acknowledge that there are “more people who are not licensed than licensed”.
When asked what responsibility the Minerals Commission takes for the negative environmental and health impact, Ayisi say his agency has prohibited the use of mercury in gold mining, instead providing mercury-free processing machines.
He also said licensed small-scale mines are monitored from the Commission’s control room in Accra to ensure compliance. It is notable that the Ghanaian government had previously introduced a nearly two-year ban on artisanal mining to curb galamsey. That ban was lifted in 2018.
A story of poor protections
Sarah Akosua comes out of a ramshackle shack – her team’s ‘changing room’ – in a forest reserve in Wassa district where the land is now pockmarked from mining. She is about to begin her shift panning for gold.
She wears a hooded plastic sheet to offer rudimentary protection from the chemicals and smears clay on her face to protect her from the glaring sun.
Once she is ready, Akosua jumps into a large brown-water-filled pit to control the machinery that pulls excavated soil onto a platform where it is washed by rushing water. Pieces of crude gold mixed with sediment and soil are filtered out and processed with mercury and other heavy metals to form gold amalgam (a mixture of gold and mercury).
The wastewater, a byproduct of this process, flows away into streams. “I know very well that the chemicals can be very harmful, but we don’t have a choice,” Akosua told CNN. “When you get sick, you go to the hospital, get medication, and then you come back and continue with work because when you stop, there’s nothing for you to do.”
The 30-year-old said she’s been working at this small unlicensed mine for four years. She earns between 700 cedis ($43) and 1000 cedis ($62) every week, depending on how much gold she and the 11 other miners find.
Others involved in the operation of this illegal mine, CNN learned, provide the miners with the equipment and fuel they need to keep the mine running. These individuals then buy the amalgam panned by the mine at a discounted price and the workers, which also include managers, divide up the proceeds.
An hour away from where Akosua works, 50-year-old Cudjoe Agyare waits for a delivery of amalgam he’s buying from illegal miners. He told CNN that every day he sells at least three pounds of gold, making about 35,000 cedis ($2,183) a month.
To refine the amalgam, Agyare heats it in a pan to vaporize the mercury. It is the repeated burning of the amalgam that creates pure gold and releases mercury vapors.
Asked what protection he takes from the highly toxic vapors released into the air, he described wrapping a cloth around his nose and notifying his neighbors. “I tell my neighbors to stay away until I’m done,” said the local gold dealer.
These precautions are hardly sufficient. In 2020, environmental chemist Eugene Ansah was part of a team of researchers who assessed the exposure to mercury vapor indoors in a community in rural Ghana that had shifted from subsistence agriculture to small-scale gold mining for their livelihoods.
The researchers found that combining mercury with gold (which they described the preferred way to capture gold because it is cheap and requires little by way of equipment) and then burning the resulting amalgam led to mercury concentrations 10 times higher in those households that burnt amalgam than those that didn’t.
Crucially, they identify “elevated exposure” in both miners and other residents in the community. More research needs to be done in Ghana to get a better picture of the nature and scope of the harms caused by heavy metal exposure from mining pollution.
Still, studies from around the world show the wide range of health risks associated with small-scale mining such as galamsey. “It’s a strong public health concern,” WHO environmental health specialist Edwin-Isotu Edeh told CNN, urging urgent government action.
The Pediatric Society of Ghana has also stressed the urgency of the situation, stating that heavy metals, including mercury present in unlicensed gold mining is “significantly contributing” to the deaths of exposed children, “as well as cognitive deficits” later in life, and is “suspected to cause congenital malformations.”
Yet knowledge of these risks within mining communities is sorely lacking. Ossei told CNN that deformities are often blamed on “supernatural powers and curses.” The Ministry of Health of Ghana has not responded to CNN’s multiple requests for interview or comment.
Change won’t come overnight
Despite the public protests and concern from Ghana’s development partners, such as the UK government, an end to galamsey will be slow to come, Minerals Commission CEO Ayisi warned. He, however, agreed there is a problem: “They’re taking samples from some of these water bodies and heavy metals are all over the place,” he said, speaking of the work being done by Ghanaian scientists.
Ayisi told CNN that the government was working on solutions, including providing alternative livelihoods and teaching safer mining practices. According to state media, Ghanaian troops were deployed in October to shut down illegal mines.
“The government has taken a lot of steps, including teaching the miners sustainable mining practices,” he said, but “it will be foolhardy on anybody’s part to think that the problem will be resolved overnight.”
When the demand for gold is matched by high levels of poverty, there are few incentives to stop miners from putting their lives and the lives of others inadvertently at risk.
Sarah Akosua said she feared for her health but felt helpless because she has no other source of income. In the absence of alternatives, she relies on her faith to keep her safe. “I believe that with God, everything is okay, and I won’t have any issues.”
CNN