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A video of young people engaging in what appears to be artisanal mining at night emerged on social media last week.
In the video, a sea of young people with shovels and pickaxes was seen digging in the night, aided by headtorches, flashes of light from their phones. Excavators were also spotted in the background.
Shared in the context of the ongoing national discourse on illegal mining (galamsey) and the government’s attempt to curtail it, the video has been widely distributed on various social media platforms (here, here, and here) with commentary suggesting that this is how illegal miners are going about their business in a way to outwit the National Anti-illegal Mining Operations Secretariat (NAIMOS).
However, checks by Fact-check Ghana reveal that the video is not from Ghana. Conducting a frame-by-frame analysis and running each frame through reverse image search platforms, the team realised that the video is originally from Cameroon.
The video is specifically from the Batouri District in Cameroon. Fact-check Ghana’s search revealed a Facebook page, Ing. Tsayo Bogning Gaius Marcial, was one of the first to have shared the video online.
Marcial’s account published the video on November 17, 2025. However, the video started trending in Ghana on November 19, 2025, with some handles editing its audio to add the popular “atasa” sound clip to make it seem as if the activity in the video happened in Ghana.
Artisanal gold mining in Batouri District
Batouri, located in eastern Cameroon, is one of the districts in the central African country known for its gold mines. Many residents in the community are said to rely heavily on artisanal gold mining as a livelihood. The women are reported to use the simple methods of panning for gold by scooping sand and silt with a pan from the river bottom and sifting through for gold. The men, on the other hand, are said to use the “open-pit’’ technique. This technique entails drilling, blasting, and removing quantities of soil and sub-soil with their axes. The ore (gold) is then extracted from the soil.
Batouri’s gold is geologically made up of Pan African granitoids, which are the host rocks of gold mineralisation. This explains the rocky nature of the location in the video where the young people were mining.
Satellite images of Batouri that Fact-check Ghana collected from Google Earth indicate the traces of the impact of artisanal gold mining.
Photos from the gold mines of Batori that the team obtained from open reports by some credible media outlets are similar to the landscape seen in the viral video.
In conclusion, the viral video of young people mining during the night is not from Ghana but from the Batouri district in Eastern Cameroon.
