African gold: 405 tonnes shipped to the Emirates in 2022 outside legal channels, according to GI-TOC

Around 405 tonnes of gold shipped from Africa to the United Arab Emirates in 2022 may have been smuggled out of the continent, representing 66.5% of these exports, according to an estimate by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) cited on October 22, 2026, by Africanews' Business Africa programme. This metal indeed left Africa, but it never generated the revenue for African state budgets that it should have.

The Cameroonian case: 44 tonnes on one side, 148 kilos on the other

The most striking example comes from Cameroon. According to national mining company figures cited by Africanews, Dubai received 44 tonnes of Cameroonian gold between 2021 and 2025. Over the same period, the country's officially declared exports amounted to 148 kilograms. The discrepancy, on the order of one to three hundred, is no longer a matter of statistical inaccuracy but of an organized parallel trade.

Interviewed on the show, Marcena Hunter, who leads GI-TOC's work on extractive industries, stresses that this off-the-books gold deprives governments of essential revenues. Behind the figure lie well-known routes: cash purchases at artisanal mining sites, transit through neighboring countries, and then re-export to Gulf refineries, where its origin is lost.

Three African responses

The continent is not passively watching this outflow. Burkina Faso has commissioned its first gold refinery in Ouagadougou, adopted a new mining code, and entrusted the trade and control of the metal to two state-owned enterprises, Africanews reports. Refining locally means retaining added value and, above all, knowing what is leaving the country.

Côte d'Ivoire, whose official production rose from 13 tonnes in 2012 to 51 tonnes in 2023, created a state-owned precious metals company to regulate the supply chain, and increased sentences for illegal artisanal mining up to twenty years in prison. Illegal artisanal mining there continues to be blamed for severe environmental damage to waterways and agricultural land.

What is at stake

The debate over gold smuggling is often reduced to a matter of local crime involving artisanal miners. The volumes serve as a reminder that this is primarily an international supply chain, involving buyers, transporters, and refiners based outside the continent, who turn untraceable gold into perfectly sellable bullion. As long as importing countries do not demand the same documentary rigor as they do for oil or diamonds, African refineries and new mining codes will only solve part of the problem. The question of who benefits from this gold is also, and perhaps above all, a question raised outside Africa.