Commodities
Gold
Industrial and artisanal production, export revenue and the informal networks around it — the fiscal base of the Sahelian states.
Conflict coverage · Central Sahel
AssessmentModerate confidence
Not investment advice. This surface explains exposure and transmission channels; it never recommends, ranks or names securities. Figures are estimates and carry their own as-of dates and confidence grades.
Current state
Where this economy stands
Moderate confidence · Economic data as of 2026-08
Mali's economy is the war's main battlefield: a landlocked, gold-dependent state whose revenue runs through mines its enemies are approaching and whose fuel runs through corridors they are burning. Since September 2025 JNIM has attacked the economy directly — the blockade is a campaign, not a side-effect. This section explains exposure and transmission; it is not investment advice.
~US$21–22bn
GDP (nominal)
World Bank/IMF estimates
high single-digit % of budget (est.)
Defence burden
opaque procurement; SIPRI coverage limited post-coup
~94 tonnes (record)
Gold production
A record annual figure, and the principal engine of GDP growth
4th largest producer worldwide; ~6.9% of global output
Uranium production rank
4,704 tonnes of uranium oxide in 2023
The economy, as analytical objectsWhat is economically exposed in Sahel, as 7 selectable objects. Each carries its own records, its exposure class and — where the corpus establishes one — the mechanism by which pressure reaches it.Interrogate Sahel in Explore
Energy
Refined fuel
Imported diesel and petrol, the corridors that carry it, and the blockade pressure applied to them.
Trade & transport
Trade & transport
The road and port corridors three landlocked states depend on, and what closing them costs on both sides of the border.
Agriculture & food
Agriculture & food
Cotton, rice and cereals — the cash crop, the irrigated core and the household food balance.
Agriculture & food
Livestock
The pastoral economy and household wealth — and a revenue base for armed groups through raiding and levy.
Sanctions
Sanctions & regional finance
The AES rupture with ECOWAS, the levies and restrictions that followed, and the external finance replacing what left.
Reconstruction & aid
Aid & development finance
Donor assistance and development lending, and the withdrawal of both — the external money these budgets have relied on.
The full assessment7 blocks of analysis and 5 graded exposures, filed under the objects above — the module’s own words, with their own dates
Everything below is authored on this module’s economy record. Figures carry the vintage of the release that produced them, not the date of this page: the section is graded Moderate confidence and its figures are stated as of 2026-08.
GoldCommoditiesHigh exposure
| Commodity | Why it matters here | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Gold | ~80% of exports and the fiscal base of the state — industrial mines in the west, a vast artisanal sector, and the revenue that pays for the war and, by credible reporting, for the Russian partnership. | High exposure |
Gold — the fiscal base under pressure
As of 2026-08
Gold is roughly 80% of exports and the state's indispensable revenue, concentrated in the western belt around Kayes and Kéniéba. The junta has squeezed the sector hard: a 2023 mining code raising the state's take, then a two-year confrontation with Barrick over the Loulo–Gounkoto complex — provisional administration, an ICSID arbitration, and a settlement reached in November 2025 in which Barrick paid roughly US$430m in total, of which about US$253m went to the state, withdrew its arbitration claims and accepted the new code in exchange for a ten-year permit extension and restored operational control. Barrick regained operational control on 18 December 2025 and production resumed in the last days of that year; the Loulo permit was formally renewed for ten years and transferred to its local subsidiary on 13 February 2026, with 2026 guidance of 260,000 to 290,000 attributable ounces. The signal to foreign operators is double-edged: the state will take more, and it will also settle.
Sources: EITI Mali extractive-sector disclosures↗ · Barrick Mining corporate statements and filings↗ · World Bank country data (Mali)↗ · Reuters↗
Artisanal mining and the informal economy
As of 2026-06
Hundreds of thousands work Mali's artisanal gold sites — a livelihood system, an export channel that partly escapes the state, and a soft target no one protects. Regional smuggling of Malian gold through neighbouring states is documented in EITI reporting and UN panel work. Where armed groups tax artisanal sites, this module records it only where specifically sourced — the general claim that jihadists "fund themselves with gold" is more often asserted than evidenced.
Sources: EITI Mali extractive-sector disclosures↗ · UN Security Council and Panel of Experts reporting↗ · International Crisis Group↗
What to watch
- Gold output and the Barrick restartWhether Loulo–Gounkoto's restart holds through 2026, and whether other operators read the settlement as a resolution or a warning.
- Insecurity in the gold beltWhether JNIM's western campaign moves from corridor attacks to sustained pressure on mining areas — the state's fiscal base has no substitute.
Refined fuelEnergyHigh exposure
| Commodity | Why it matters here | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Refined fuel (imported) | Entirely imported through Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, the first two reportedly carrying close to 95% of it. The blockade target: over 300 tankers reported destroyed since September 2025, with power and transport in Bamako visibly degraded, and supply sustained only by escorted convoys. | High exposure |
Transport and fuel — the blockade
As of 2026-08
Landlocked Mali imports its fuel through corridors it does not control: Dakar via Kayes, Abidjan via Sikasso, with Guinea as a third leg. The Senegalese and Ivorian routes alone are reported to carry close to 95% of the country's petroleum imports. In September 2025 JNIM declared a blockade and began burning tanker convoys — over 300 reported destroyed, with satellite imagery showing Bamako visibly darker by late 2025 and sabotage hitting the capital's water and power in July 2026. The pressure has been applied in phases rather than continuously: it eased in early 2026, reportedly under negotiation and heightened military activity, and a full blockade was reimposed on 28 April. Reporting also indicates the campaign extended to the eastern route from Niger. The counter-fact belongs beside the destruction figure: the army is reported to have escorted more than a thousand tankers into Bamako since late October 2025, so the corridor has been degraded and taxed rather than closed. That is the most consequential economic fact in the country — an insurgency taxing an entire national economy by controlling the roads into it, at a cost the state pays in fuel, forces and time rather than in territory.
Sources: ACLED conflict data & analysis↗ · International Crisis Group↗ · Reuters↗ · Africa Center for Strategic Studies↗
What to watch
- Tanker convoy lossesThe single best indicator of the blockade's bite: convoys arriving, tankers burned, and fuel queues in Bamako, Ségou and Kayes.
Trade & transportTrade & transport
What the blockade costs the corridor states
As of 2026-06
The blockade is not only a Malian fact. Mali was Senegal's largest export market in 2024, taking about 26.5% of Senegalese exports, roughly US$1.42 billion; between September and November 2025 the Port of Dakar reported a daily backlog of around 120 Mali-bound containers, with estimated Senegalese losses near US$26.5 million a month, and about 4,000 empty containers were still stranded in Bamako in February 2026. Mali remained Côte d'Ivoire's largest customer inside the West African monetary union, with the Abidjan–Bamako corridor carrying roughly 1.47 million tonnes of goods by the end of 2025. An insurgency inside one landlocked state is therefore a revenue problem for two coastal ones — which is the mechanism by which this conflict reaches countries that are not in it.
Sources: France 24 / RFI↗ · Reuters↗ · World Bank country data (Mali)↗
Agriculture & foodAgriculture & foodGraded per commodity
| Commodity | Why it matters here | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Cotton | The main cash crop and the largest rural employer after subsistence farming, concentrated in the Sikasso belt — exposed to input costs, transport insecurity and world prices at once. | Moderate exposure |
| Grain (rice, millet, sorghum) | Domestic food security, concentrated in the Office du Niger irrigation zone and the inland delta — precisely where village blockades operate. | High exposure |
Agriculture and food
As of 2026-06
Cotton in the Sikasso belt, livestock across the pastoral zones, rice from the Office du Niger, and rain-fed grain everywhere else. Every one of these depends on movement: inputs in, harvests out, herds to market. Insecurity and fuel costs tax all of it, seasonal rainfall sets the ceiling, and farmer–herder competition converts scarcity into violence that recruits for the insurgency.
Sources: World Food Programme assessments↗ · World Bank country data (Mali)↗ · UN OCHA humanitarian reporting (Mali / Sahel)↗
What to watch
- Food prices and the harvestPlanting and harvest security in the Office du Niger and the delta, and cereal prices in the southern markets.
LivestockAgriculture & foodModerate exposure
| Commodity | Why it matters here | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Livestock | A pillar of the pastoral economy and of household wealth — and a war resource: raided by armed groups, taxed by JNIM, and at the centre of the farmer–herder conflict driving the centre's violence. | Moderate exposure |
Sanctions & regional financeSanctions
Regional alignment and finance
As of 2026-08
The ECOWAS rupture — final in January 2025 — cost less than the rhetoric on both sides implies, and the difference matters. ECOWAS announced that it would maintain the free trade zone with the three states "until further notice", and their citizens continue to enjoy visa-free movement, residence and establishment across the bloc. What lapsed was membership itself: institutional voice, the dispute-settlement machinery, and the standing to shape rules the three still trade under. Corridor dependence was untouched, because geography does not resign. The AES funds itself with a 0.5% import levy agreed in March 2025 and has built the apparatus of a confederation around it: a joint customs duty, an investment bank, a biometric passport and, since August 2026, a consultative parliament. It talks about monetary sovereignty; Mali remains in the CFA franc, because the alternative is a currency no one outside the bloc would hold. Sanctions exposure, correspondent-banking caution and the 2022 ECOWAS freeze pushed finance toward regional banks, gold sales and non-Western partners. Russia, Türkiye, China and Gulf relationships are recorded in this module where specifically sourced, not assumed from alignment.
Sources: Official government statements · Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa)↗ · Africa Center for Strategic Studies↗
What to watch
- AES economic integrationWhether the levy, joint projects and monetary talk produce anything that offsets the ECOWAS exit — or whether the corridor dependence simply continues on worse terms.
Aid & development financeReconstruction & aid
Aid and development finance
As of 2026-06
Development finance contracted sharply after the coups, the Wagner deployment and the Western rupture; humanitarian funding, at ~21% of the 2025 appeal, is the lowest in a decade. For an economy where aid was a material share of public investment, this is a structural loss layered on top of the war — and it lands on the same population the blockade is squeezing.
Sources: UN OCHA humanitarian reporting (Mali / Sahel)↗ · World Bank country data (Mali)↗ · International Crisis Group↗
Actor economiesThe economic record Vigil holds on each of the 14 parties in this module — revenue base, figures and constraints, per actor
State actor — economic profile
Mali (transition)
A gold-dependent, landlocked economy at war: the state runs on mining revenue and customs collected on corridors its enemies now systematically attack.
~US$21–22bn
GDP (nominal)
~80%+
Gold share of exports
Mining revenue + customs under blockade pressure
Budget reality
War economy
The junta squeezed the mining sector for revenue — the 2023 mining code, the Barrick dispute settled in early 2026 for roughly US$430m and a stake in future production — while the fuel blockade taxes the whole economy from the other side. Sanctions-era isolation pushed finance toward regional banks, gold sales and non-Western partners.
Confidence: ModerateFiscal data lags and wartime figures are estimates.Economic data as of 2026-06Mali (transition) — full profile →
State actor — economic profile
FAMa
Defence consumes an outsized and opaque share of a small state budget.
high single-digit % of budget (est.)
Defence burden
Financing
Rearmament — aircraft, drones, vehicles — has been financed against mining revenue and Russian credit arrangements whose terms are not public. The army is both the state’s largest expense and, through the war, its largest constraint on revenue.
State actor — economic profile
Burkina Faso (transition)
A gold economy growing while the country it funds loses ground — the sharpest divergence between macroeconomic performance and security conditions anywhere in this module.
~94 tonnes (record)
Gold production
5.0% (2025), 4.9% projected (2026)
Real GDP growth
98% of merchandise arrives by sea, then road
Import dependence
Gold, and the divergence it creates — 2026-08
Production reached a record of roughly 94 tonnes in 2025 and real GDP grew 5.0%, with the IMF attributing the acceleration principally to gold — including an artisanal supply response to higher prices that outweighed contractions elsewhere. The state has moved hard to capture more of it: a revised mining code in 2024 created SOPAMIB as the vehicle for state participation, artisanal gold export permits were suspended in February 2024 to curb smuggling, and a fully state-owned mine opened at Yako on 9 July 2026. The divergence is the point: the economy is growing on one commodity while the territory the state administers is shrinking.
A landlocked state whose fuel is stored abroad — 2026-08
Burkina Faso imports 98% of its merchandise by sea and moves it inland by road through four corridors — Lomé, Abidjan, Cotonou and Tema. The Ouagadougou–Lomé axis carries about 40% of all cargo entering the country; Abidjan–Ouagadougou runs 1,150 km with SITARAIL moving roughly 900,000 tonnes a year. Hydrocarbon import and storage are a state monopoly under SONABHY, but the transit storage itself sits outside the national territory — in Lomé, Cotonou, Tema, Bolgatanga and Côte d'Ivoire. A landlocked state's fuel reserve is held on someone else's ground, which is the structural fact behind every corridor negotiation it enters.
The same playbook, a different commodity — 2026-08
Burkina Faso's formalisation drive, Mali's confrontation with Barrick and Niger's nationalisation of its uranium are the same resource-sovereignty strategy applied to three different commodities and three different foreign operators. This module treats it as one regional mechanism with three national expressions rather than three national stories.
State actor — economic profile
Niger (CNSP)
A uranium exporter in open legal conflict with its operator and an international tribunal, whose principal import route has been closed for three years. Exposure runs in both directions at once.
4th largest producer worldwide; ~6.9% of global output
Uranium production rank
63.4% Orano / 36.6% SOPAMIN
SOMAÏR ownership
70–80% through the Port of Cotonou
Pre-crisis import route
117 billion CFA francs (reported)
Border-closure revenue loss
The uranium dispute — 2026-08
Niger is the world's fourth-largest uranium producer, around 6.9% of global output. SOMAÏR, which operates the Arlit mine, is 63.4% owned by the French company Orano and 36.6% by the state's SOPAMIN. Orano halted output at Arlit in October 2024 amid financial strain; the mine passed to Nigerien operational control in December 2024; and in June 2025 the government announced nationalisation, stating that Orano had taken 86.3% of production between 1971 and 2024 — the state's own figure. An ICSID tribunal has ordered Niger not to sell or transfer the stockpiled uranium pending Orano's claims, and Niger has announced on state television that it intends to sell it anyway, asserting a legitimate right to dispose of national resources. Orano has condemned a reported shipment as illegal. The dispute is unresolved and is being conducted in public.
The corridor that closed — 2026-08
Between 70% and 80% of Niger's imports passed through the Port of Cotonou before 2023, and Nigerien cargo was around 80% of that port's transit volume — a mutual dependence. The closure of the Malanville–Gaya bridge in July 2023, followed by Benin's suspension of transit from August to December, collapsed the route; traffic redirected to Lomé, Abidjan, Dakar and Nouakchott at higher cost, and Lomé handled 2.06 million TEU in 2024 with 92% of its transit traffic bound for AES states. Niger is reported to have lost 117 billion CFA francs in public revenue. The Niger–Benin oil pipeline to the Sème-Kpodji terminal still operates intermittently, because neither side has gained by dismantling it — the clearest illustration that the rupture is political and the dependence is not.
Same strategy, opposite trajectory — 2026-08
Niger's uranium nationalisation and Mali's confrontation with Barrick are structurally the same dispute — a state, a foreign operator, an international arbitration, a seized asset — and so far they have gone opposite ways. Mali settled in November 2025 and production resumed; Niger is defying the tribunal and marketing the stock. How the two end is the best available test of what resource sovereignty in this region actually buys.
State actor — economic profile
Russia (Sahel role)
A presence financed, by credible reporting, through mining-linked arrangements and state contracts — the books are closed.
reported mining-linked arrangements + state contracts
Financing
The bargain
Investigative and UN panel reporting has linked the Russian presence to gold-sector arrangements; details remain opaque and disputed. What is clear is the structure: security support flows in, resource-linked value flows out, and neither side publishes the price.
Non-state actor — war economy
JNIM
A war economy of taxation, cattle, gold and ransom — and, in the blockade, the weaponisation of everyone else’s economy.
zakat/taxation, livestock, artisanal gold, kidnap-for-ransom (reported)
Revenue base
Economic warfare
The 2025–2026 fuel blockade converts corridor geography into leverage: several hundred tankers reported destroyed, Bamako’s power and fuel visibly disrupted, and the state’s customs and growth squeezed without a single city taken. Where it dominates rural areas, reported taxation of trade, cattle markets and artisanal mining funds the organisation.
Non-state actor — war economy
FLA
A movement economy of the desert borderlands: livestock, cross-border trade and the informal economies of the Algeria frontier.
community levies, cross-border trade, diaspora (reported)
Revenue base
Resources & constraints
The north it claims is poor in state revenue but rich in routes: whoever holds Kidal and the border taxes movement. Unlike JNIM it has no national economic-warfare arm — its economics are subsistence for a fighting movement, which is one reason the alliance holds.
Non-state actor — war economy
IS Sahel
Coercion economics: cattle raids, levies on trapped communities and control of border-zone smuggling nodes.
livestock raiding, taxation, cross-border smuggling (reported)
Revenue base
Resources
UN panel and research reporting describes raid-and-tax financing in the tri-border economy — livestock above all. Its violence against markets it cannot control makes it, unlike JNIM, an economy-destroyer more than an economy-parasite.
State actor — economic profile
Algeria
A hydrocarbon state whose Saharan south is economically tied to a Malian north it cannot stabilise.
~US$260bn
GDP (nominal)
Reopening prospects tied to the 2026 reset
Trans-Saharan corridor
Border economics
The frontier zone runs on informal trade — fuel, food, goods — that sustains communities on both sides and, incidentally, the movements operating there. The reopened airspace revives talk of the trans-Saharan corridor linking Mali to Algerian ports, a project whose viability depends on the security of exactly the areas neither state controls.
State actor — economic profile
AES
A bloc economy project — common levy, talk of a common currency — built between three of the world’s poorest, most landlocked states.
~US$55–60bn (est.)
Combined GDP
Economics of the rupture
Leaving ECOWAS traded institutional membership for policy sovereignty — but not, so far, market access: ECOWAS has kept the free trade zone in place "until further notice" and citizens of the three states retain visa-free movement, residence and establishment across the bloc. What was surrendered is a vote on the rules and the dispute machinery behind them. A 0.5% AES import levy now funds the confederation. Members share dependence on gold and imported fuel — exactly the exposure JNIM’s blockade exploits — and exploratory ties to Russia, Türkiye, China and Gulf financiers are courted where sourced, not assumed.
State actor — economic profile
France
Commercial and monetary ties largely severed; the CFA franc question outlived the soldiers.
Withdrawn; commercial links much reduced
Presence
What remains
French firms have largely exited or been squeezed out since 2022. The West African CFA franc — French-backed, and a standing AES grievance — remains Mali’s currency; leaving it is discussed far more than it is planned, because the alternative is a currency no one outside the bloc would want.
State actor — economic profile
MINUSMA
The mission was itself a significant slice of the northern economy — and its exit was an economic shock to the towns it left.
~US$1.2bn
Annual budget (peak)
The exit shock
MINUSMA employed, contracted and bought locally at a scale nothing in northern Mali matched. Its withdrawal removed both a security presence and a payroll from Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal at once — a compounding factor in the northern economy’s decline that is easy to overlook next to the fighting.
State actor — economic profile
ECOWAS
Political exit, economic dependence: the corridors and the currency did not leave with the membership.
Dakar & Abidjan — both through ECOWAS states
Mali’s import corridors
The dependence that outlived the membership
Landlocked Mali imports nearly all its fuel through Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. Leaving ECOWAS changed the politics of those corridors, not the geography — and the AES import levy adds friction to trade that still has to cross them. This is the central economic fact of the blockade war.
State actor — economic profile
Türkiye
A commercial relationship — drones, construction and trade — expanding into the space Western firms vacated.
Defence sales, construction, trade
Nature
The commercial opening
Turkish firms have expanded across the Sahel — defence above all, but also construction and consumer goods — as European commercial presence receded. The relationship is transactional in both directions, which is its stability and its ceiling.
Evidence and grading
- Exposure
- How strongly this part of the economy is exposed to conflict developments. An assessed exposure class, not a price forecast and not a probability.
- Confidence
- How well established Vigil considers this assessment to be. It is not a measure of how badly the economy is affected.