- Artisanal miners’ shafts and underground workings provide geological clues that Kavango is using to refine gold targets
Kavango Resources Plc is using Zimbabwe’s extensive artisanal mining footprint as a source of geological data, mapping existing shafts and underground workings to help identify gold targets without having to start exploration from scratch, Mining Zimbabwe can report.
By Ryan Chigoche
The approach is being applied at the London-listed explorer’s Hillside Gold Project in the Filabusi Greenstone Belt, where artisanal and small-scale miners have worked parts of the ground for decades. Rather than treating those workings solely as a competing mining footprint, Kavango is using the rocks and structures already exposed by miners to complement its formal exploration programme.
“It’s not just a feel-good partnership,” Chief Operating Officer Alexandra Rose Gorman said in a presentation. “We use them as an exploration vector.”
Kavango’s geologists map artisanal shafts and adits across the project, recording the rock sequences exposed underground as well as vein orientations, host-rock alteration and visible signs of mineralisation. The information is then compared with the company’s structural models, geophysical surveys and geochemical data to refine potential drill targets.
For a junior explorer, the approach can provide information from ground that has already been physically excavated by miners, potentially reducing the amount of early-stage trenching and other work needed to understand a mineralised area.
“These guys know rocks better than geologists. They’re fantastic,” Gorman said. “They identify mineralised areas long before they appear in any kind of data set.”
The value comes not only from what miners expose but also from their accumulated knowledge of where gold occurs. Artisanal operators often follow mineralised veins underground, giving exploration teams another source of information on the orientation and continuity of structures that can then be tested using conventional exploration techniques.
At Hillside, Kavango has reported a JORC-compliant resource of 52,900 ounces, while continuing to test extensions of the project’s known gold-bearing structures. The company’s Steenbok prospect, for example, includes high-grade parallel reefs that have been mined from surface by small-scale miners, with subsequent drilling intersecting multiple zones of gold mineralisation.
Kavango is also looking beyond individual workings. Gorman said the same approach could potentially be applied across Zimbabwe’s established gold belts, where thousands of artisanal workings represent a largely untapped source of geological information.
“If the whole artisanal mining network was mapped, it would be a game-changer in terms of mineral systems or the sampling,” she said. “You would have thousands of data points across the country at virtually zero cost.”
Such a database could give explorers a more detailed picture of where mineralisation occurs before committing significant capital to drilling. For Zimbabwe, where artisanal and small-scale gold mining is widespread, it could also turn an informal mining footprint into an additional source of exploration intelligence.
Kavango is seeking to build a working relationship with artisanal operators around its projects, including through technical support aimed at improving mining practices and recovery. The company says the objective is for artisanal and larger-scale operations to coexist rather than compete for the same ground.
The strategy fits into Kavango’s broader plan to develop Hillside into a producing gold operation while continuing to explore for additional resources. The company has been commissioning a 50-tonne-per-day processing plant at Hillside as it moves toward production.
For Kavango, however, the miners’ value extends beyond the ounces they produce. Their shafts, trenches and knowledge of the geology provide a starting point for exploration that the company can combine with modern geological and geophysical techniques.
“The two can and will, and should coexist,” Gorman said. “The joy of having such abundant geology is that there’s room for everyone—if we collaborate.”
