Intro

For over a decade now, the Sahel region is in the midst of a gold rush—one that is fuelling both economic opportunity and violent conflict. Across the region, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has surged, providing livelihoods for millions but also driving instability, smuggling, and foreign interference. In Sudan, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, gold has become a key battleground, financing armed groups, strengthening authoritarian regimes, and attracting external actors like Russia’s Wagner Group. Yet, gold does not have to be a curse. With the right policies, countries can shift from illicit trade and exploitation to a regulated sector that benefits local economies rather than fuelling war. Ghana, for instance, has taken steps to formalize ASM, offering a potential model for the Sahel. But will the region break free from the cycle of resource-driven conflict, or will gold remain a source of instability?

The first part of this article series will examine the ways in which gold has contributed to political unrest in Sudan. The second part will turn to the recent conflicts in the Western Sahel and the exploitative involvement of the Russian mercenary forces, the Wagner Group in them. The last part of this short series will discuss sustainable alternatives to gold mining in Africa.

Part 1: Sudan: A Case Study in Gold, Conflict, and Foreign Interference

The gold price has doubled since 2019, soaring to a record high of more than $2,900 per troy ounce, promising higher margins for industrial miners but also encouraging more artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Nearly half of the roughly 1,000 tons of gold produced in Africa every year is mined in this way, and most of it is being smuggled out of the continent. Gold mining is the largest source of jobs in rural Africa, save for farming, so a sustained gold boom could potentially mean higher incomes for some very poor people. At the same time, gold mining could damage ecosystems and people’s health and contribute to political unrest due to the astronomical sums of money that it generates. Much of ASM is legal, but a lot remains untaxed and unregulated. In a report from May 2024, a specialised NGO estimated that the amount of smuggled gold more than doubled from 2012 to 2022. It appears that, once again, African states are missing out on the full benefits of a commodity boom.

The Sahel Gold Rush owes much to the 2012 discovery of a rich vein that crosses the Sahara from east to west. Since then, gold mining has experienced a boom throughout the region, from Sudan in the east to Mauritania in the west, straddling the entire Sahel belt and dramatically rearranging the political, economic, military and social relations in the region in its wake. One of the unique features of the Sahel gold rush is that it has been driven by small-scale artisanal mining efforts and facilitated by low-cost metal detectors operated by unskilled miners. The impact of the gold rush on the geopolitics of the region is both profound and problematic. In the Sahel, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, there is a clear correlation between the abundance of gold and that of political violence (see map 1 below).

 

Source: Herodote

Until 2011, the year in which South Sudan seceded and gained its independence from Sudan, Sudan’s economy mostly relied on its ample oil reserves for exports. However, between 2010 and 2015, Sudan’s oil exports sank from $9.69 billion USD to a mere $629 million USD. Though Sudan’s former President al-Bashir initially offered mining concessions to large international companies, the discovery in 2012 of gold in the Jebel Amir (aka Jebel Marra) mountains of northern Darfur changed everything. Rumours about the riches found in the region circulated and resulted in a full-scale gold rush, as dozens of thousands of diggers from neighbouring countries rushed to the area. Between 2011 and 2014, Sudan’s gold production surged to 70 tons per annum, while gold sales rose from ten percent of Sudan’s exports to 70 percent, reaching a value of $4 billion USD.

In 2014, a series of economic sanctions were imposed on the country by western powers, pushing Sudan closer to Russia. Following al-Bashir’s official state visit to Russia in 2017, a host of Russian geology and mineralogical experts arrived in the country, and a new local mining company called Meroe Gold came to life, chaired by no other than the head of the Wagner Group, the now deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin. To evade international sanctions imposed on Sudan, the lion’s share of gold exports from Sudan was smuggled out of the country through dark channels, ending up primarily in the UAE. It is estimated that in 2022 $1.34 billion USD worth of gold was smuggled out of the country, which amounts to more than half of the gold that is mined in the country every year. Even today, as Sudan is crippled by a devastating civil war, gold remains the country’s top export amounting to 60% of the country’s exports in 2024 and generating revenues of more than $1.5 billion USD.

The protracted humanitarian crisis in Darfur and the ruinous civil war in Sudan are closely tied to the ascent of gold as the king of Sudan’s economy, and of which the meteoric rise of General Hemedti as influential political leader and power broker in the country is exemplary. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — aka Hemedti — is one of the local figures whose rose to fame from a series of conflicts surrounding the control of gold mining in Jebel Amir region. Hemedti now serves as the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that has become an influential actor in the Sudanese civil war. Since its inception, the RSF has been primarily financed by the revenues generated from the Darfur gold trade, with Hemedti’s family company, Al Gunade, being one of Sudan’s leading mining and trading companies. In 2019, Hemedti was one of the key figures involved in the successful coup that toppled President al-Bashir’s regime and from which the former emerged as one of the country’s notable faction leaders in civil-war-ridden Sudan. In this, Hemedti owes much to the backing he received from Russia after his RSF forces secured control of the Jebel Amir gold trade in 2017.

Having guaranteed Russia’s official backing, which was formalised in an official visit to Russia in 2022, Hemedti developed aspirations to rule the entire country. Since 2023, RSF forces have been fighting Sudan’s national army (SAF) in a ruinous civil war, which the UN termed in a recent report “the most devastating humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.” According to recent UN data, the humanitarian crisis affects more than 30 million people, causing massive famine and forcing millions of refugees to flee the country. Given the gravity of the crisis in Sudan Hemedti’s forces have recently lost most of their international backing, including that of Russia. Presently, only the UAE (which remains the main export hub for Darfur gold) still supports Hemedti. This underscores how gold continues to contribute to political instability in Sudan in particular and the broader Sahel region.

Gold alone cannot explain Hemedti’s rise to fame, but it does explain the support he received from Russia, which, until lately, actively supported the RSF forces through their proxy—the Russian mercenary forces of the Wagner Group. Shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hemedti was flown in to Moscow for an official state visit where he met with foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. It has been claimed that the timing of Hemedti’s visit was intentional and motivated by Russia’s need to buttress its gold reserves ahead of the invasion of Ukraine, which began a few days later. In exchange for gold, amounting to dozens of tonnes of gold per year, Wagner forces provided training and active military support to Hemedti’s forces and thus destabilised the country. Sudan’s case, however, is not unique. Across the Sahel gold has become both an economic lifeline and a driver of conflict.

Though Wagner Group mercenaries have since retreated from Sudan, after Russia shifted its allegiances in Sudan in exchange for a concession to build a Russian Red-Sea naval base, Wagner continues to operate in other politically unstable parts of the Sahel region where they can satisfy their demand for gold and other minerals. Currently, their main sphere of operation is in the turbulent Western Sahel region, which will be the subject of the second part of this article series.