Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, Ken Ashigbey, has argued that Ghana cannot depend solely on local capacity to fully exploit its vast mineral resources, insisting that foreign investment remains essential to unlocking the sector’s full potential.
According to Mr Ashigbey, the scale of Ghana’s mineral deposits is too significant for domestic actors alone to develop effectively, making international partnerships necessary to provide capital, expertise, and technology.
He stated that Ghana’s underground gold reserves are enormous, describing them as running into “trillions of ounces,” while emphasising that local resource limitations make external investment unavoidable.
“The thing we should bear in mind is that, beyond the things we are mining, there are six gold belts, the six trillions of ounces of gold that are sitting there and we as Ghanaians alone will not be able to do it; we still need to be able to attract some investors to come and do it,” he said.
Mr Ashigbey made the remarks during a high-level policy dialogue titled “To Nationalise or Transform? Rethinking Ghana’s Approach to Mining, Oil and Critical Minerals,” organised by JoyNews in Accra on Tuesday, May 26.
The forum brought together industry leaders, policymakers, academics, and governance experts to discuss Ghana’s extractive sector model amid growing debates over nationalisation and alternative strategies that combine local participation with foreign investment.
His comments come at a time when national discussions continue over how Ghana should manage its natural resources, with some stakeholders advocating full nationalisation while others support hybrid approaches that blend domestic ownership with international financing and technical expertise.
Ghana has been a major gold-producing country for more than a century and also possesses significant deposits of bauxite and manganese.
The country entered the oil-producing era following the commencement of commercial crude production from the Jubilee Field in December 2010.
Attention is now increasingly shifting toward lithium and other critical minerals as Ghana positions itself within the global energy transition and the growing international demand for battery-related resources.
Mr Ashigbey’s remarks reflect the ongoing policy debate between maintaining resource sovereignty and the practical need for international partnerships in an industry that is both capital-intensive and technologically complex.
