By Obrempong Yaw Ampofo
Drive through Wassa Akropong, Asankragua, Offin Dunkwa, and other mining enclaves today and one thing becomes immediately clear: these are no longer quiet rural communities. Not long ago, these towns moved at the slow pace of farming life; modest, agrarian, cocoa money drive, and largely overlooked by national development attention.
Today, they are bursting with commercial activity, busy streets, high population mobility, new construction, and rapid urban expansion. In many respects, population growth, trade, transport intensity, and night-time activity, they are matching or even surpassing Sekondi–Takoradi, the Western Regional capital.
It is not state planning or industrial policy that transformed these towns. It is gold, both legal and galamsey. Whether one approves or disapproves, a hard truth confronts us:
Small-scale mining; legal and illegal, has acted as an alternative development engine for communities the state had forgotten. And that reality exposes both opportunity and crisis.
Development the State Did Not Plan, But Cannot Deny
Wassa Akropong township isn’t rural anymore
For years, state-led investments in these areas lagged. But mining formal and informal, triggered internal migration, commerce, and local economic dynamism.
Gold money has financed:
- the rise of small businesses
- housing and building booms
- nightlife and hospitality services
- informal financial networks
- new transportation economies
One striking example is transportation transformation.
Pragya or Keke has become the main transport means
The “Pragya” Revolution
A decade ago, the idea that small mining towns would have efficient, cheap, mass informal transport systems would have sounded like fantasy. Yet today, there are thousands, if not millions, of Indian-designed tricycles (popularly called Keke or Pragya) navigating the mining belts.
They have:
- reduced transport costs,
- created thousands of jobs,
- improved first-mile and last-mile mobility,
- expanded market access, and
- given communities a transportation system that government never built.
What Accra debates as “informal transport innovation” became everyday life in mining towns years ago, financed by gold earnings and driven by practical necessity, not policy. Once again, informal systems solved problems formal governance was too slow to address.
A State Playing Catch-Up
Wassa Akropong
Government responses have largely been reactionary: military deployments, task forces, bans, excavator seizures. Yet while the state has been chasing miners, mining towns have grown into commercial hubs without planning, infrastructure, or institutional support.
There are two truths Ghana must hold at once:
- Galamsey is dangerous, it destroys forests, rivers, and farmland.
- Galamsey has driven economic vitality in regions long neglected.
Until policy acknowledges both realities, we will keep oscillating between environmental panic and community resentment.
A Window Into Ghana’s Governance Problem
The question is not whether these towns will grow. They already have.
The question is whether the state will organize and channel this growth into sustainable development, or continue fighting an informal force that is already functioning as a parallel development model.
This calls for a pivot from “destroy and chase” to:
- Incentive-driven formalization
- Access to legal finance so miners don’t depend on illicit sponsors
- Community development tied to mining revenue
- Environment-first reclamation backed by tech, not bulldozers alone
- Regional mining development authorities to plan urban expansion
- Transport and local infrastructure investment that meets current population realities
The mining frontier tells a deeper story about Ghana’s development reality:
- When state systems fail or move too slowly, people build their own; messy, informal, and improvised as they may be.
- Young people are not lazy; they are entrepreneurial and hungry for opportunity.
- Informal gold wealth has done what formal regional planning failed to do for decades.
The future has already arrived in Wassa Akropong, Asankragua, Offin Dunkwa and beyond, vibrant, chaotic, unregulated, and powered by gold money.
The real question for Ghana is not whether we should fight illegal mining; we must. The question is whether we will finally match the speed of the people, meet communities where they are, and turn the informal growth they have created into regulated prosperity.
Because if we don’t shape the future, the future will shape itself, and it already has.