REASSESSING A TIME GONE BY,
WHEN INCLUSION WAS A POLICY FOR WINNERS
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‘Diamonds were among the few reliable sources of hard currency, and states designed systems, however imperfect, to bring that production into the formal economy. Informality was not synonymous with criminality; it was something that needed to be organized, taxed and absorbed into the mainstream.’
A former president of the London Diamond Bourse, at whose head he served from 2018 through 2024, Alan Cohen is a member of the World Diamond Council’s Board of Directors and also of its Kimberley Process Task Force.
South African-born, he left the country as a young diamantaire, settling in London and becoming part of United Kingdom’s diamond sector. When the Russian diamond industry opened to the international trade in 1990, he relocated to Moscow, where he lived and worked for 16 years.
After returning to London he became active in the public life of the industry, first at the London Diamond Bourse, and later at the World Federation of Diamond Bourses and the World Diamond Council.
JANUARY 8, 2026
On January 1, 2026, the West African Republic of Ghana formally assumed the vice chairmanship of the Kimberley Process, and during the course of the year will support the new KP Chair, India. Significantly it will automatically become the KP Chair itself at the start of 2027.
With a rough diamond output of about 330,000 carats in 2024, Ghana is a producer of modest proportions, but it has a long history in the industry, dating back to the early 1920s, when it was a British Crown colony known as the Gold Coast. Its production peaked in 1972, when it reached an all-time high of 2.66 million carats, 25 years after the country became the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence from European colonial rule on March 6, 1957.
Ghana is a particularly interesting case, not least because its diamond economy was so closely tied to national economic policy.
Independence Arch, a national monument located at Black Star Square in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Commemorating the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1957. Commissioned by Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first prime minister and president, it remains one of the nation’s most enduring symbols of unity, resilience and national pride. (Photo by Ifeoluwa B. on Unsplash)
Artisanal miners as ‘winners’
My connection to Ghana dates back to the mid-1980s, when I first visited the country in search of new sources of rough diamonds.
At that time, Ghana’s diamond trade was tightly structured. All legal transactions passed through the Diamond Marketing Corporation (DMC), which in the late 1980s was reconstituted as the Ghana Diamond Marketing Board, by the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).
For history buffs, the PNDC was the military government that ruled Ghana from 1981 to 1992, following a coup led by Jerry Rawlings, an Air Force lieutenant. It exercised direct control over strategic export commodities, including diamonds. There was at the time a single major producer in the country — the Ghana Consolidated Diamonds mine at Akwatia. Remaining production came from artisanal and small-scale mining.
The system of managing rough diamond production was not perfect, but its purpose was clear — diamonds were a fungible strategic national resource, meaning that foreign-exchange control stood at the center of policy.
During casual conversations that I had then with DMC/PNDC members, I was struck at how they used the word “winners” when referring to artisanal diggers. I found it inspiring. The term captured the essential spirit of alluvial diamond mining — the hope and even belief that the next shovel-full of gravel might yield something transformative. It wasn’t romanticism, but rather a recognition of their motivation and aspirations.
A linguistic shift, and change in attitude
Four decades later, the language has changed. Today, the term most commonly used to refer to artisanal diggers in Ghana is “galamsey,” which is a pidgin corruption of “gather them and sell.” It’s primarily applied when discussing illegal gold mining, but its logic and stigma increasingly bleed into the public discourse around artisanally mined diamonds as well.
“Galamsey” has become shorthand for describing illicit and unregulated mining, conjuring up images of environmental damage, polluted rivers and destroyed farmland. Where “winners” once suggested opportunity, the preferred term today carries the weight of blame and condemnation.
It’s a shift in language that has troubled me. And it did not happen overnight, nor did it originate with the Kimberley Process. The change was already underway years before the KP was established, as centralized marketing systems were weakening, and artisanal production was slipping from managed informality into legal ambiguity.
The change revealed deeper transformations in the rough diamond markets, and in the state’s capacity at the time to provide proper means of governance. It revealed early assumptions that later were to shape international policy, with the seminal event being the creation of Kimberley Process.
A tribal chief bringing rough diamonds for sale at the Kurt Marx buying office in Accra, shortly before Ghanaian independence in 1957. The buying office was established in 1955. (Photo from the Archives of Mr. Kurt Marx.)
Overlooking a once-accepted policy understanding
Today, the public debate around artisanal diamond mining follows a familiar script — informality is equated with illegality. Media reporting, NGO narratives and enforcement rhetoric present artisanal diamonds as being inherently suspect.
This framing is so pervasive that it is rarely questioned. Yet it overlooks a crucial historical reality. In many of Africa’s key diamond-producing countries, artisanal diamonds were once deliberately integrated into formal distribution systems — not because of indifference or deliberate oversight, but because they were central to foreign-exchange policy.
Ghana was not alone in this approach. Across much of East and Central Africa’s diamond belt, artisanal production was not treated as an aberration, but as a feature of the industry that had to be managed.
In Sierra Leone, diamonds were channeled through the National Diamond Mining Company, which acted as the state’s central buying and export arm. In Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), the government relied on MIBA to capture value and foreign exchange from both industrial and artisanal production. Guinea followed a similar path, treating diamonds as a strategic foreign exchange asset, organizing buying through state-controlled channels.
In each of these cases, artisanal mining was neither idealized nor demonized. It was encouraged, tolerated, and regulated to varying degrees, because it served a clear economic purpose.
Diamonds were among the few reliable sources of hard currency, and states designed systems, however imperfect, to bring that production into the formal economy. Informality was not synonymous with criminality; it was something that needed to be organized, taxed and absorbed into the mainstream.
But severe currency distortions during the mid-1980s complicated the system. Large gaps between official and real exchange rates meant that private buyers, who could convert diamonds into hard currency offshore, were often able to outbid state channels restricted to using local currencies. For most artisanal diggers, the rejection of formal systems became a rational and sometimes inevitable economic choice. It was classic example of how macro-economic conditions, and in particular foreign-exchange policy, can shape outcomes on the ground.
An imperfect counterargument
Angola is often presented as the counterpoint to tolerating an informal diamond industry. Its artisanal mining sector is frequently cited as evidence that unregulated rough production inevitably leads to conflict.
But there, too, the picture is more complicated. Through ENDIAMA, the Angolan state managed rough diamonds as a strategic national resource, seeking to control foreign-exchange earnings. What shattered the system was not the artisanal miners, but rather the prolonged civil war. Large alluvial areas fell under the control of the rebel movement UNITA, turning diamonds into a means of financing war rather than national development.
When the conflict ended, Angola moved quickly to centralize once again diamond buying, reabsorbing artisanal production. This was not an ideological shift, but a practical one. Exclusion had failed, and integration proved the only workable solution.
In that sense, Angola’s post-war reforms quietly reaffirmed an older lesson, which is that bringing artisanal production into the system, rather than keeping it outside, is essential to restoring control and stability.
The case of Angola matters because it shaped the conflict-diamond narrative from which the Kimberley Process emerged. And, while that narrative was forged in wartime, its assumptions were applied more broadly, including in countries where artisanal mining was not linked to conflict at all, but to economic survival. In those instances, the fit has often been uneasy.
A street market inthe Ghanaian capital of Accra. (Photo by Muntaka Chasant on Wikimedia Commons)
Rethinking the formalization of artisanal mining
As the Kimberley Process prepares to assess the Ghanaian diamond sector once again, such questions matter.
We need to go to the heart of how artisanal production is understood — not only in peaceful places like Ghana, but more broadly across the diamond-producing world. We need to consider whether today’s policy frameworks address the real root causes, or whether they are mainly a response to the legacy of systems that quietly collapsed decades ago.
Rebuilding pathways into formality doesn’t mean recreating the admittedly flawed policies of the past. But at the same time, we should recognize that earlier used systems understood something we have lost. They were premised on the understanding that inclusion, however imperfect, is often a stronger form of control than exclusion ever will be.