01/10/2026
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso just reached a milestone its people have waited decades for.
President Ibrahim Traoré has held up the first gold bar ever refined entirely on Burkinabé soil, following the opening of RAFFINOR-BF, the country's first national gold refinery.
Until now, Burkina Faso mined its gold and then shipped it abroad for refining, which meant much of the value and profit stayed elsewhere. ⛏️ With the new facility, the gold can be processed, certified and turned into wealth at home.
The refinery starts with a capacity of 164 tons per year, and there are plans to expand it.
"Our ambition is no longer to be a country that extracts its raw materials and sends them abroad," Traoré said. "We want to refine all our metals here."
The whole project is presented as a push for sovereignty and a message to the wider African continent: controlling the refining means controlling the value. 🌍
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