Zambia’s State-controlled mining investor expects to unlock more than $1.8-billion from the country’s small-scale gold industry by adopting Ghana’s model for formalizing the sector, its chief executive officer said.

Official gold exports can be significantly increased by regularizing the existing informal trade, ZCCM Investments Holdings CEO Kakenenwa Muyangwa said in an interview, pointing to the vast mismatch between the imports reported by buyer countries and declared shipments leaving Zambia.

The United Arab Emirates imported nearly $1.8-billion of gold from Zambia in 2023 and Hong Kong $108-million, according to data from the World Integrated Trade Solution. Yet official statistics from the central bank showed the southern African nation exported less than $128-million of the metal that year.

In Ghana, artisanal and small-scale gold output surpassed that of large producers for the first time last year, generating about $10.8-billion in foreign exchange. The surge followed the creation of the State-owned Ghana Gold Board, which channels purchases from small-scale miners through the formal market, and helped boost foreign-exchange reserves.

The change also underpinned a rally in the cedi last year that made it the world’s second best-performing currency of those tracked by Bloomberg.

“This is what we hope to achieve in Zambia,” Muyangwa said. “We are very excited about this golden opportunity.”

The Ghana model has also drawn the interest of Senegal, which said in June it plans to study its gold board to improve traceability.

ZCCM-IH has already partnered with Mining Mineral Resources to produce and buy gold from artisanal miners in the North-Western Province, and has a similar business model at Kamunshinshi Mineral Resources in the area.

It has also set up a commercial gold trading unit to purchase the metal from other areas, Muyangwa said. Increasing production to a few hundred thousand ounces yearly from the 127 000 oz Zambia produced in 2025 is “totally achievable,” he said.

Soaring bullion prices have added fresh impetus to Zambia’s focus on the industry, even as its much larger copper industry booms. While gold has retreated from a January peak of above $5 400 an ounce it is still historically high at more than $4 300.

“The price of of gold is high enough,” Muyangwa said. “Let’s take advantage.”