Burkina Faso has opened its first gold refinery in the capital, Ouagadougou, in a move aimed at improving the organisation of gold commercialisation and retaining more value from the country’s mineral resources.

Captain Ibrahim Traore inaugurated the National Gold Refinery of Burkina Faso, known as RAFFINOR-BF, on Monday. The facility had been under construction since 2023, according to the Presidency of Burkina Faso.

The presidency said the refinery was financed by the state in partnership with Burkina Faso’s domestic private sector. It placed the facility’s current annual production capacity at 164 tonnes of gold, with a projected long-term capacity of up to 515 tonnes.

The reported construction cost was 11 billion CFA francs, equivalent to $19 million.

Focus on domestic processing

The refinery forms part of broader efforts to handle more of Burkina Faso’s gold industry within the country. The presidency described the opening as a milestone in the country’s pursuit of economic independence.

Traore, as quoted by the presidency, said the country no longer wanted to simply extract raw materials and send them abroad.

“Our ambition is no longer to be a country that simply extracts and ships its raw materials abroad,” he said. “We want to refine all our metals locally… we want to have the entire value chain here.”

The source does not specify how much gold the refinery had processed at the time of its inauguration or when it could reach the projected capacity of 515 tonnes.

Efforts to regulate informal mining

Burkina Faso suspended exports of gold from informal mining in 2024 as part of an effort to better organise the sector, Mines Minister Yacouba Zabre Gouba said.

The country is one of Africa’s leading gold producers. The World Gold Council, as cited in the source report, ranked Burkina Faso as the continent’s third-largest producer and said it produced more than 94 tonnes of gold in the previous year.

Authorities have traditionally faced difficulties controlling the informal gold-mining sector, which has been affected by smuggling and jihadist violence. The gold trade has also been linked in the source report to trafficking involving jihadist groups in the Sahel region.

Traore has warned that large quantities of gold were leaving Burkina Faso fraudulently and said this helps to fuel terrorism. Those statements are attributed to Traore and were not independently verified in the source.

Since taking power in a 2022 coup, Traore’s administration has nationalised several gold mines and pursued higher domestic industrial output in areas including cotton, tomatoes and textiles. The refinery opening adds gold processing to that wider economic agenda.