The Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) has announced an immediate, temporary suspension of new applications for several categories of gold buying licences.

The move signals a significant shift in the country’s approach to regulating its lucrative gold sector.

The suspension confirmed in an official statement released on February 16, 2026, is positioned as a strategic pause to pave the way for comprehensive regulatory reforms.

Which Licences Are Suspended and Which Remain Open?

Effective immediately, GoldBod will no longer accept new applications for:

• Tier 1 and Tier 2 Buying Licences: These are typically the core licences for operators directly purchasing gold from the small-scale and artisanal mining sectors.
• The Self-Financing Aggregator License: This licence category is designed for larger entities that aggregate gold from licensed buyers using their own capital.

In a notable exception, the Aggregator License—a distinct category from the self-financing version—will remain the only gold trading licence open for new applications during this interim period. This suggests the Board may view this licence type as a model for the future or as less critical to the immediate areas of reform.

GoldBod has also assured the industry that any applications submitted before today’s announcement will be processed as usual. The Board has committed to expediting these reviews, provided all regulatory requirements and fee obligations are met.

Why the Sudden Suspension?

According to the official statement signed by Management and CEO Samuel Gyamfi, Esq., the suspension is not a freeze on growth, but a calculated step to facilitate “impending reforms to the national gold buying framework.” The Board explicitly states the goals of these reforms are to:

• Enhance Transparency: Bringing more openness to how gold is traded and priced.
• Improve Compliance: Ensuring all players in the value chain adhere to a clear, enforceable set of rules.
• Strengthen Traceability: Creating a system that can track gold from its source to export, combating illegal mining (galamsey) and smuggling.
• Ensure Greater Value Retention: Maximising the financial and economic benefits Ghana derives from its own gold resources.

The message is clear: the government, through GoldBod, is seeking to build a regime that is “robust, accountable, and internationally competitive” while safeguarding the “national interest.” This implies that the current licensing framework may be seen as outdated, susceptible to abuse, or insufficient to capture optimal value for the country.

What This Means for Stakeholders

For prospective investors and entrepreneurs looking to enter Ghana’s gold market, the immediate path is now narrower. With Tier 1 and Tier 2 licences unavailable, new entrants must carefully evaluate whether the remaining open category—the Aggregator License—aligns with their business model.

For existing licence holders and those with pending applications, the news provides a degree of certainty. Their applications are safe, and the promise of expedited reviews is a positive signal. However, all stakeholders should anticipate that the forthcoming reforms may introduce new compliance requirements, operational standards, or fee structures for all licence types once the suspension is lifted.

The announcement also serves as a warning to those operating outside the formal system. A push for greater transparency and traceability invariably means a crackdown on illicit activities. The reforms aim to make it harder for illegally mined or smuggled gold to enter the official supply chain.

Looking Ahead

GoldBod has stated that further updates on the reform process and the revised licensing framework will be communicated “in due course.” The industry now waits to see the details of these changes.

The suspension represents a pivotal moment, underscoring the government’s intent to assert greater control and extract more value from one of Ghana’s most vital economic assets.

For now, the message to the market is one of order, patience, and preparation for a new, more structured era in Ghanaian gold trading.

U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a one-year extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), providing immediate duty-free access and retroactive tax refunds to qualifying exporters in 32 sub-Saharan African countries — but only through December 31, 2026.

The short-term reauthorization, enacted in early February 2026, ends the uncertainty that followed the original September 30, 2025, expiration.

African businesses that paid extra duties since October 2025 can now claim full refunds, delivering quick cash-flow relief to garment makers, horticulture exporters, and other AGOA beneficiaries.

However, the 11-month window — far shorter than previous multi-year renewals — has raised concerns across the continent.

The U.S. has explicitly tied the brief extension to expectations of “reciprocal market access,” signaling that future eligibility could hinge on African governments opening their markets more fully to American goods and services.

Key implications for Ghana and other AGOA-eligible nations include:

• Immediate duty-free treatment for over 1,800 product lines (textiles, apparel, agricultural goods, handicrafts, etc.) retroactive to October 2025
• A clear 2026 deadline for negotiations on a longer-term or replacement agreement
• Heightened U.S. scrutiny of trade barriers, intellectual property protections, and investment rules
• Continued exclusion of certain countries (e.g., those failing eligibility criteria such as human rights or rule-of-law benchmarks)

Trade analysts describe the move as a deliberate shift toward conditional, shorter-duration trade preferences — a departure from the bipartisan, decade-long renewals that characterized AGOA since its launch in 2000. The one-year horizon gives Washington leverage to push for concessions while giving African exporters a temporary lifeline.

For Ghana — one of AGOA’s most consistent users — the extension secures continued duty-free access for apparel, shea butter products, cashews, and other exports to the U.S. market. Yet exporters and policymakers now face a compressed timeline to prepare for potentially tougher talks in 2026.

The African Union, ECOWAS, and individual governments have welcomed the refund mechanism but expressed concern over the uncertainty.

Many are already calling for a permanent, rules-based successor framework that better aligns with AfCFTA goals and Africa’s industrialisation ambitions.

As the clock ticks toward the end of 2026, the coming months will test whether AGOA’s legacy can evolve into a more balanced, reciprocal partnership — or whether both sides will need to chart an entirely new course for U.S.-Africa trade relations.

In a quiet but unmistakable escalation of economic influence across Africa, China has agreed to provide zero-tariff access to its massive market for 53 African countries.

The move comes just weeks after the United States extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) for another decade.

The announcement, reported by Business Insider Africa on February 13, 2026, follows years of diplomatic and commercial positioning by both superpowers. Beijing’s move effectively removes tariffs on a broad range of African exports — including agricultural products, minerals, textiles, and light manufactures — giving African producers significantly improved access to the world’s second-largest consumer market.

The decision comes after sustained lobbying by African governments and the African Union, as well as China’s own strategic interest in securing long-term raw material supplies, diversifying trade partners away from Western markets, and deepening political goodwill across the continent.

While no official Chinese government statement has yet detailed the exact product coverage or implementation timeline, analysts interpret the agreement as a direct counterweight to AGOA’s renewal (signed into law by President Biden in late 2025 and extended through 2035).

AGOA provides duty-free access to the U.S. market for over 1,800 products from eligible sub-Saharan African countries, but is conditional on meeting governance, human rights, and market-access criteria — conditions that have led to periodic exclusions (most recently Eswatini in 2024).

China’s zero-tariff offer appears unconditional and broader in scope, covering nearly the entire continent (excluding only a handful of nations without diplomatic relations with Beijing). The timing is widely seen in diplomatic circles as a deliberate signal: Beijing is positioning itself as the more reliable, less conditional partner for African trade and development finance.

For Ghana and other resource-rich West African nations, the dual developments create both opportunity and strategic complexity. Zero-tariff access to China could accelerate exports of cocoa, shea butter, cashew nuts, bauxite, manganese, and emerging value-added products. At the same time, AGOA remains vital for apparel, automotive components, and light manufactures destined for the U.S. market.

Trade experts caution that realizing the full benefits will require African governments to address supply-side constraints: logistics bottlenecks, quality certification, meeting sanitary/phytosanitary standards, and scaling up industrial processing capacity.

Neither Washington nor Beijing has publicly spoken about the moves as competitive, but analysts and diplomats widely view them as part of a long-term, largely silent contest for economic primacy and political influence in Africa — a resource-rich continent whose population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050.