Benishangul-Gumuz Sent 8,985 Kilos of Gold to the Central Bank. In an Earlier Year It Sent 274.

A single Ethiopian region handed the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) more than 8,985 kilograms of gold — just under nine tonnes — during the 2025/26 financial year.

For scale: in an earlier full financial year, Benishangul-Gumuz supplied about 274kg. A subsequent quarter recorded 548kg. A later 10-month stretch reached roughly 3.7 tonnes. The trajectory is 274 → 548 → 3,700 → 8,985, and the last step alone is more than a doubling.

Tijani Adem, head of the regional mining bureau, disclosed the figure at a mining-sector mobilisation forum in Assosa, the regional capital.

The gold didn't appear. The buyer changed.

Benishangul-Gumuz is one of Ethiopia's four main gold-producing regions, alongside Tigray, Oromia and Gambella. Its deposits sit mainly in the Assosa, Kemashi and Metekel zones, and — this is the crucial part — extraction there is done overwhelmingly by artisanal and small-scale miners, not industrial operators.

Artisanal output doesn't vanish when it isn't sold to the central bank. It goes somewhere else. So a thirty-fold rise in formal deliveries is not primarily a production story; it is a story about a miner in Metekel deciding that the NBE's window pays better than the alternative.

The NBE engineered that decision deliberately. It has used pricing incentives and premiums, paired with tighter licensing and enforcement, to pull production into its purchasing system — the goal being foreign-exchange earnings and reserves. The macroeconomic reforms since 2024, including the change to the foreign-exchange regime, shifted the arithmetic further: when the official rate stops being artificially strong, the informal buyer's premium shrinks.

What the region still can't control

Regional officials were blunt about the limits. They named illegal mineral trading and gaps in the use and management of hazardous chemicals as live problems in the sector.

Geography compounds it. Benishangul-Gumuz sits on the Sudan border, which makes informal gold flows structurally harder to police. And with licensed associations, individual miners and informal producers all working the same ground, monitoring what is actually produced — as opposed to what is eventually declared — is close to impossible.

Ashadli Hassan, head of the regional government, said the administration would focus on preventing illegal activity in mining and increasing the benefits the region draws from its own minerals. The bureau is also pushing to expand coal and marble output and supply more minerals as industrial inputs, according to Adem.

The region says it generated more than $1.18 billion in mining-sector revenue over the past five years, with gold a significant share of that.

The incentive that built this is scheduled to end

Here is the tension worth holding on to. The premium is not permanent.

The NBE is preparing changes to its gold-buying system that include phasing out the premium it pays, allowing private banks to purchase gold, and strengthening quality controls — with a longer-term move away from the central bank's direct role in the market expected around the end of 2026.

If the surge in formal deliveries was bought with a premium, the open question is what happens to those 8,985 kilos when the premium goes and private banks become the counterparty instead. Either the formalisation has become habit — licensing, enforcement and a competitive exchange rate doing the work on their own — or the volumes drift back toward the border. The 2026/27 figure is the one that answers it.

Sources:

• Birr Metrics — "Benishangul-Gumuz Delivers Nearly 9 Tonnes of Gold to Central Bank" (August 31, 2026)
• Underlying figures: regional mining bureau statements at the Assosa mining-sector

mobilisation forum, via Birr Metrics' reporting

Editorial note: The comparison figures (274kg, 548kg, ~3.7 tonnes) are described in the source only as "an earlier full financial year," "a subsequent quarter" and "a later 10-month period" — the exact years are not stated, and this piece does not assign them. Confirm the periods with the regional mining bureau before publishing if precise year labels are wanted.