On September 28, 2026, Burkina Faso's President Ibrahim Traoré inaugurated the country's first national gold refinery, RAFFINOR-BF, in Ouagadougou. The refinery was built at a cost of more than 11 billion CFA francs (about $19 million).
Its first phase has a stated refining capacity of 164 tonnes of gold per year, with plans to increase that to 515 tonnes. The refinery is designed to produce gold with 99.99% purity.
Burkina Faso produced about 94 tonnes of gold in 2025, according to government figures reported by AP and local authorities.
The project began with the laying of its foundation stone in November 2023, making the inauguration the completion of a project that had been under construction for several years.
What changes when a country stops exporting its resource primarily in raw form and starts capturing more of the value chain at home?
Gold has always been valuable.Now value is captured.This makes the refinery more than a building filled with machinery.
When a country owns the resource beneath its soil, but someone else captures much of the value after it leaves the country, who is really getting rich from the resource?
Is natural-resource wealth truly wealth if a country does not control more of the journey from mine to finished product?
Does owning the gold matter more — or controlling what happens to the gold after it is mined?
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