
The Price of Gold: Chinese Mining in Ghana
Afua Hirsch travels to Ghana to trace how Chinese migrants have moved into the country's small-scale gold mining sector, once reserved by law for Ghanaian citizens. The film follows galamsey operations, the local term for small-scale mining, showing how Chinese operators have brought excavators and industrial equipment into pits historically worked by hand, sharply increasing output and profit while displacing local miners from their own concessions. Hirsch interviews Ghanaian miners who describe losing land and livelihoods, local officials struggling to enforce mining laws, and Chinese migrants explaining why they came and how they operate. The camera shows churned riverbanks, mercury used in processing, and the machinery driving the change. The report sets this local story against the wider picture of Chinese investment across Africa, asking who actually benefits when foreign capital moves faster than the regulations meant to contain it. It is a grounded, on-the-ground account of a resource rush and the tensions it creates between economic opportunity and control over land.