Mali has established a new state body to regulate its artisanal gold sector, a move prompted by the discovery of significant gaps between the country’s officially declared gold exports and the quantities recorded by importing countries. The Malian Office of Precious Substances, approved by the Council of Ministers, will be tasked with centralising and overseeing the country’s gold trade in an effort to curb smuggling, improve transparency and ensure Mali captures a greater share of revenues from its most valuable natural resource.
The scale of the problem the new agency is designed to address is stark. A 2024 report by SWISSAID estimated that between 30 and 57 metric tonnes of Malian gold, worth between $1.98 billion and $3.77 billion, leave the country each year without being officially declared. Looking at the longer picture, the same report estimated that between 2012 and 2022, approximately 300 tonnes of undeclared gold valued at $13.5 billion left Mali through informal channels. These are not minor discrepancies. They represent a systematic haemorrhaging of national wealth that has gone largely unchecked for over a decade.
Artisanal mining sits at the heart of Mali’s economic and social fabric. The sector employs nearly two million people across an estimated 350 to 400 mining sites across the country, making it one of the largest sources of livelihoods for ordinary Malians outside of agriculture. Yet the government has long acknowledged that a large share of what those miners produce leaves Mali through informal channels, bypassing official export systems and generating none of the tax revenue that the state needs to fund public services and infrastructure.
Gold is Mali’s leading export across both artisanal and industrial production. Industrial mines alone produce and export around 60 tonnes annually. Official export figures from the national statistics institute Instat show that gold exports rose sharply from 1.61 trillion CFA francs in 2024 to 2.75 trillion CFA francs, equivalent to approximately $4.81 billion, in 2025. South Africa was the largest destination for Mali’s officially declared gold exports in 2025, accounting for 60.4 percent of shipments, with the United Arab Emirates and Australia following at 12.2 percent and 12.1 percent respectively.
The establishment of the Malian Office of Precious Substances is Mali’s most direct institutional response yet to the gap between those official figures and the true volume of gold leaving the country. By centralising oversight and creating a dedicated regulatory body with authority over gold flows, the government is signalling that it intends to bring a sector that has long operated at the edges of formal oversight firmly within the reach of the state.
The move places Mali within a broader global trend. Artisanal mining accounts for more than 20 percent of total global gold production and provides livelihoods for over 10 million people worldwide. Governments across Africa and beyond have increasingly sought to formalise the sector, recognising that leaving it outside regulatory frameworks does not make it disappear but simply ensures that its economic benefits flow to informal networks rather than national treasuries. The challenge, as Mali will discover, lies in implementation. Formalising a sector built on informal practices, operating across hundreds of sites and involving millions of participants, requires not just a new institution but sustained enforcement capacity, community buy-in, and the political will to maintain oversight even when it is costly and contested.
For a country governed by a military junta that has been seeking to reassert sovereign control over its natural resources while distancing itself from Western partners, the creation of the Malian Office of Precious Substances also carries a symbolic dimension. It is a statement that Mali intends to manage its own wealth on its own terms. Whether the new agency has the capacity to translate that intention into measurable reductions in smuggling and meaningful increases in official revenues will determine whether this reform amounts to a genuine turning point or another well-intentioned institution added to a long list of underperforming ones.
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