Mineral export documentation for gold and diamonds often ends up passing through Customs officer’s desks without comment, because they have no way to prove the documents are fake. Officers handle consignments from a great many jurisdictions, each with its own licence formats and signatures; spotting a forgery thus requires expert knowledge specific to the mining sector, and without a live link to the issuing authority there is no solid basis on which to hold a shipment.

The scale of the problem is considerable, and for African governments that export minerals the revenue losses are substantial. Significant volumes of artisanal gold and diamonds leave the African continent each year on the basis of forged documents.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has long flagged artisanal production in the Mano River region in West Africa as a corridor where origin laundering is a persistent risk. The practical consequence for Customs is that a shipment presented as legitimately exported from one country may in fact have been smuggled across a land border, bought for cash and supplied with paperwork that looks correct but was never legitimately issued. Without a live link to the exporting authority, this cannot be detected at the point of import.

For this purpose, in 2024 a web-based verification portal was launched for exports from Sierra Leone, and this has now been extended to include Liberia. Funded by the European Union and supported by German Development Cooperation (GIZ), the portal draws live data from the Mining Cadastre Administration System (MCAS) – a licensing platform already used by many African mineral authorities. Every export document MCAS issues now carries a QR code; a Customs officer anywhere in the world can scan it with a mobile phone and, within seconds, confirm the exporter, the licence, the declared value, the mineral and the shipment’s source of origin against the issuing government’s official record.

MCAS has been in use for over a decade in several jurisdictions and was recently deployed at Sierra Leone’s National Minerals Agency (NMA) and Liberia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME). Both countries use it to administer the full licensing chain – exploration and mining licences, artisanal permits, dealer licences and export permits – and to operate the valuation desks that value gold and diamond consignments before export.

The newly integrated Valuations module extends MCAS from cadastre administration into the shipment workflow itself. Every consignment exported under a dealer or broker licence is now recorded digitally at the point of valuation, with royalties and export duties calculated automatically against the declared quantity, grade and market value. Receipts, invoices and formal export letters are generated by the system, replacing the manual paperwork that previously accompanied each shipment. Sierra Leone has even gone a step further and developed a new traceability module that links each shipment back to the artisanal production site, so that every gram of gold and every diamond carry a verifiable origin. This will be the last piece of the puzzle for NMA, showing the extent of their ambition to manage the chain of custody of gold and diamonds produced in Sierra Leone.

In December 2025 MME held an official launch in Monrovia, demonstrating how licence holders manage applications online and how payments are integrated directly with the Liberia Revenue Authority (LRA). At the same time, the MME Office of Precious Minerals (OPM) adopted the MCAS valuation module and processed the first gold shipment using the new system.

The fraud pattern the portal is designed to defeat is well known to Customs: forged signatures, retired stamps and invalid permit codes on otherwise plausible paperwork, often attached to gold or diamonds whose true origin is a neighbouring country’s informal workings rather than the producer named on the permit. By embedding a QR code tied to the live MCAS record, the issuing authority and the receiving Customs administration share the same source of authentication. Verification moves from a document examination exercise to a database search – and every scan is logged, giving both sides an audit trail that supports post-clearance analysis and intelligence sharing.

Looking further ahead, RDF is extending the platform into a full digital chain of custody for gold and diamonds, tracking minerals from the mining site through valuation to export. For Customs and revenue authorities at the receiving end, this means an unbroken, verifiable audit trail for every consignment crossing the border – and for producer countries, alignment with international standards including the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.

The work has been delivered in close partnership with the NMA in Sierra Leone and with the MME and LRA in Liberia. Since MCAS is provided free of charge to governments in developing countries, the model is built for long-term institutional ownership rather than vendor dependence. In February 2026, the Minerals Commission of Ghana hosted an RDF governance-systems workshop in Accra, bringing together all mining authorities running MCAS; Sierra Leone and Liberia presented their results on export traceability to much admiration from the participants.

Customs administrations interested in more information about the verification system or export procedures are invited to use the contact details below.

More information

About RDF’s systems:

Sierra Leone NMA Previous Minerals and Trade department, Director Mohammed Bah

Liberia Ministry of Mines and Energy, Director Rebecca Fallah