No matter how much one tries to explain that most gold refineries in Africa are loss-making value sinks than serious investments, many Africans will struggle to accept that reality.

Many on the continent have been inundated for far too long with the same arguments about how “exporting gold in raw form” is the height of neocolonialism that they understandably view any sign of local refining as the pinnacle of redemption.

A few years ago, I explained why for more than a decade, refinery upon refinery has opened up in Ghana only to fail, and yet every new one is celebrated as a major landmark achievement. It is mostly an issue of weak national/continental learning, the primary mechanism of the phenomenon called katanomics.

There is no point rehashing the points about low profit margin, poor job creation, and high imported input intensity. What I want to do, instead, is give readers a flavour of just how many of these refineries have opened up in recent years across the continent.

Given how often people lament that the continent is still not refining its gold, the record of these projects alone should lead to obvious questions about what we have learnt so far in the region from all the various efforts to refine more metal locally.

Gold Refineries Across Africa

Collected data as of 3^rd November 2026

There are at least 49 refinery entries across 20 African countries. The lists below record 39 documented entries across 19 countries and 10 provisional entries requiring additional status research.

D = documented inauguration, reported operation or explicit refining-capability evidence. P = provisional identity or historical record requiring additional plant-level confirmation. Capacity figures are meant to be indicative of installed base and should not be construed as effective throughput.

Country counts

Refinery List