By: Kweku Atta Hagan
Illegal small-scale mining, commonly known as galamsey, continues to devastate Ghana’s forests and rivers and water bodies. The resulting environmental damage threatens food production, drinking-water supplies and public health.
Research and field reports have linked mining-related contamination to harmful chemicals in food crops and to adverse birth outcomes in affected communities.
For years, the state’s primary response has been personnel-based. Task forces, sometimes involving the military, rely largely on human intelligence to locate and dismantle illegal mining sites.
This reactionary approach is both costly and slow. By the time enforcement teams arrive, extensive environmental degradation – deforestation, mercury and cyanide contamination of rivers, and destruction of farmland – has often already occurred.
The 2026 national budget allocates GH¢150 million to the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat (NAIMOS) for operations, environmental cleanup and land restoration.
While this reflects political commitment, analysts argue that the allocated funds may be insufficient considering the scale and persistence of illegal mining.
Technology offers a way forward. Continuous surveillance using satellites, cloud computing and artificial intelligence can shift enforcement from reactive to preventive one, enabling authorities to detect and respond to illegal mining activity before severe environmental damage occurs.
Modern satellite constellations provide frequent coverage of forested regions. European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, for example, use C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), allowing detection of ground disturbance even through cloud cover. These datasets are hosted on cloud platforms and updated regularly, enabling systematic monitoring across large territories.
Cloud-based geospatial platforms such as Google Earth Engine host massive archives of satellite imagery and provide tools for land-cover classification, change detection and machine-learning analysis. These systems can process new imagery rapidly and generate near-real-time alerts, depending on data availability.
Alert platforms such as Global Forest Watch combine multiple satellite-based indicators, including radar-based alerts, to highlight areas of likely forest disturbance. When integrated into enforcement workflows, such systems can dramatically reduce response times improve the efficiency of field operations.
Evidence from other countries demonstrates the impact of this approach. In Peru, the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) uses Google Earth Engine and other analytical tools to deliver continuous alerts across all Amazon countries.
By combining multi-temporal satellites data, drones (UAVs) and advanced algorithms, the initiative helped reduce illegal gold-mining deforestation by up to 90 percent in targeted zones coupled with decisive enforcement actions. Similar pilot projects elsewhere have shown that artificial-intelligence and machine-learning models can identify most known artisanal mining sites, although human verification remain essential.
For Ghana, the path forward is clear. A layered system combining satellite monitoring, cloud analytics, drones and community-based verification would significantly improve detection efficiency while reducing operational and enforcement costs.
Illegal mining is not only an environmental issue. It is an economic, social and public-health crisis. Leveraging modern surveillance technology, alongside firm enforcement and sustained community engagement, offers Ghana its best chance yet to protect its forests, waterways and future generations.
