When the conversation turns to galamsey in Ghana, most minds picture young men with headlamps in muddy pits, foreign actors behind heavy machinery, or soldiers storming forest camps. But beyond the excavators and the river dredges lies an often-ignored truth: women are the invisible backbone of Ghana’s informal gold economy.
Some women go into the trenches with the men
They do not always dig. They rarely make headlines. Yet without them, many mining sites would grind to a halt. They feed the miners, supply the camps, move tools and water, operate transport networks, run mobile money services, and sometimes work directly with gold ore. They are not always on the frontlines of the pits; they are the infrastructure holding the system together.
Holding Communities and Economies Together
In towns like Wassa Akropong, Asankragua, Prestea, Dunkwa, Obuasi, and Akwatia, women wake before dawn to cook for miners, carry goods, wash ore, or sell fuel and water. Others run small guesthouses, kiosks, and chop bars. When large mining camps appear overnight, women become the suppliers who make daily operations possible.
Their trade networks stretch through communities, riversides, and forest paths, stitching together the informal economy around mining.
In short, the mines don’t run without them.
Survival in a Harsh Economy
A woman washing for gold at Wassa Gyapa
Many women in galamsey communities are not there out of choice but necessity. They are young women from farming communities where income has collapsed, widows who lost husbands to mining or illness, and single mothers trying to support children.
To them, the gold fields represent something that rural agriculture and many city jobs do not:
a path, however uncertain, to economic dignity.
Where the formal economy offers silence, the mining camp recognizes effort. If you work hard, you eat. If you learn quickly, you rise. This promise, not glamour, draws women in.
The Emotional and Social Labour Nobody Sees
Women are more than workers in mining areas; they are the social glue. They provide emotional support, mediate conflicts, take care of injured workers, and organize informal savings groups (susu) that help miners build capital.
They may not break rocks, but they break isolation, despair, and hunger; the intangible forces that weaken any community.
In many mining settlements, if you want to understand what is happening, you don’t ask the pit boss, you ask the women.
Facing the Dangers Without Recognition
A woman pouring mercury in her hand without protection
Despite their crucial role, women in galamsey face substantial risks:
- Exposure to mercury fumes and chemical contaminants
- Sexual harassment and exploitation
- Violence during security raids
- Limited access to healthcare or maternity services
- Economic vulnerability when miners cannot pay debts
- Social stigma from outsiders who reduce them to stereotypes
Their labour sustains livelihoods, yet they occupy the most precarious positions in the value chain; visible only when crises appear.
Transforming Gold Dust into Futures
Unlike many male miners who gamble earnings on equipment or nightlife, women in mining towns often convert their earnings into stability. They pay school fees, support extended family, purchase land, and fund new businesses back home.
A miner may chase the next strike.
A woman in the camp often chases a future beyond the mud.
Their contributions ripple far beyond the mining pits, across villages, towns, and generations.
Seeing What We Have Ignored
The story of galamsey is incomplete without its women. They work in the shadows yet sustain the system; they absorb the economic shocks yet build the safety nets; they hustle without praise yet stabilize entire communities.
As Ghana debates illegal mining, enforcement, and environmental destruction, one truth must not be forgotten:
Women are not side characters in the galamsey story. They are central actors, quietly holding the system together.