Mali’s National Transition Council has passed legislation establishing a new regulatory body, the Malian Office for Precious Substances (OMASP), to formalize the country’s vast and largely informal artisanal gold trade. Operating directly under the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, OMASP is mandated to centralize, track, and secure the commercialization of gold and other precious minerals extracted by small-scale prospectors. The emergency intervention follows major reporting discrepancies between domestic customs and global trade desks, where massive volumes of Malian gold have routinely bypassed local channels.
The establishment of the new office signals a pivot from industrial mining reforms to the regulation of artisanal fields:
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The Scale of the Informal Economy: Artisanal panning networks provide direct employment to nearly 2 million workers across 350 to 400 active mining sites. However, weak institutional oversight has fueled illegal trade routes. A 2024 report by Swiss NGO SWISSAID estimated that between 30 and 57 metric tonnes of gold bypass Mali’s official export registers annually, leaking between $1.98 billion and $3.77 billion in undeclared trade each year.
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Aggressive Mining Code Overhaul: The creation of OMASP follows the military-led government’s 2023 mining code reforms, which raised the state’s maximum project equity stakes from 20% to 35% and recovered 761 billion CFA francs ($1.2 billion) in tax arrears from multinational corporations. The state is concurrently shifting its domestic supply chains toward internal value-addition, supported by the construction of a Russian-backed 200-ton-capacity gold refinery in Sénou.
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Regional Resource Nationalism: Mali’s regulatory strategy mirrors adjacent actions across West Africa. Neighboring Burkina Faso has similarly scaled revenue collection through its state-backed buyer, SONASP, which grew national gold production records by absorbing 42 tons of artisanal output into official records. Despite lower industrial mining output in 2025 due to disputes at Barrick Gold’s Loulo-Gounkoto complex, official Malian gold exports rose to 2.75 trillion CFA francs ($4.81 billion), with South Africa receiving 60.4% of declared volumes.
