Serious gold exploration in Kenya has to deal with three things in order: whether the licence system lets you hold the ground, whether the geology of the western greenstones justifies the work, and whether the surface lets a satellite say anything useful. This guide takes them in that order and uses the Mining Act, the State Department for Mining, the National Geodata Centre and the USGS as sources.

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We will be plain about limits that affect gold exploration in Kenya. A satellite does not see gold; it sees iron oxides, clays, silica, structure and disturbed ground, and in the Lake Victoria basin much of that is under soil and vegetation. The licence section comes first because the Mining Act also decides who is allowed to use whatever a screen finds.

“A Kenyan prospecting licence can cover up to 1,500 blocks, and a mining permit no more than two.”

Gold exploration in Kenya: the Mining Act and its licence ladder

The Mining Act, 2016 (Act No. 12 of 2016) vests minerals in the people of Kenya, managed by the National Government. The State Department for Mining answers the basic question on its FAQ page: if you find minerals on your land they do not belong to you, and you need a mining licence or permit to mine them. The text below follows the Act as published on the African Mining Legislation Atlas, together with the department’s FAQ and licensing page.

The Act measures area in blocks. A block, or cadastral unit, is a pseudo-quadrilateral formed by two meridians and two parallels of the Cadastral Graticule spaced fifteen seconds apart. Fifteen arc-seconds is about 460 metres, so by our arithmetic a block is roughly 21 to 22 hectares near the equator, and a little less further from it. We use 21.5 hectares for the rounded figures below, and the Ministry’s cadastre has the exact shapes.

Large-scale licences

A reconnaissance licence covers up to 5,000 contiguous blocks, lasts at most two years and is not renewable. Reconnaissance rights are non-exclusive, and any airborne survey results are subject to copyright rules set in regulations. A prospecting licence is exclusive and can cover up to 1,500 contiguous blocks for a term the licence specifies, never more than three years. It can be renewed up to two times, each time for up to three years, and at renewal the area must normally be cut by at least half the number of blocks, with a minimum of 125 blocks or up to three discrete areas kept, unless the Cabinet Secretary agrees to a smaller cut. A holder who has found a deposit of potential commercial significance that cannot be developed yet can apply for a retention licence. A mining licence runs for up to 25 years or the forecast life of the mine, whichever is shorter.

Small-scale permits

Small-scale operations use permits, not licences. A prospecting permit covers up to 25 contiguous blocks for up to five years and can be renewed once. A mining permit covers up to two contiguous blocks for up to five years. An artisanal mining permit lasts three years and can be renewed once, and the holder can apply to convert it to a small-scale permit. Permits are available only to Kenyan citizens or bodies corporate with at least 60% Kenyan shareholding, and a permit stops being valid if a holder becomes ineligible. An artisanal permit is not granted where another mineral right already covers the land. The Cabinet Secretary can also gazette areas reserved exclusively for small-scale and artisanal operations, and areas reserved for tender for large-scale operations.

The Act also protects landowners. Prospecting and mining rights over private land cannot be granted without the registered owner’s consent, which cannot be unreasonably withheld, and over community land they need the consent of the community land authority or, if the land is unregistered, the National Land Commission. A person asked for consent must reply in writing within twenty days. The Mineral Rights Board also requires the applicant to seek approvals before it recommends a grant, for example from the National Land Commission for public land.

Work out your blocks and your fees

A worked example: 4,000 hectares

Take 4,000 hectares. At about 21.5 hectares a block that is 186 blocks, comfortably inside the 1,500-block cap for a prospecting licence. A plan for five years of work needs the first three-year term and one renewal. At renewal the Act would halve the area to 93 blocks, but it also sets a floor of 125 blocks, so you could keep 125 blocks, about 2,690 hectares. That floor is why a smaller prospecting licence is not squeezed to nothing. If a satellite screen ranks 15% of the area as priority ground, that is 600 hectares, or about 28 blocks, which sits easily inside what you could hold. The job of the screen is therefore not to save area but to show which 125 blocks to keep and in what arrangement, since the Act also lets the holder keep up to three discrete areas.

What a mining licence carries

The Act attaches obligations to a large-scale mining licence that change the economics of gold exploration in Kenya. The State acquires a ten percent free carried interest in the share capital for large-scale operations, a holder whose planned capital expenditure exceeds a prescribed amount must list at least twenty percent of its equity on a local stock exchange within three years after production starts, and holders must give preference to local products and to the employment and training of Kenyans. These are the terms a buyer of an exploration project should price in before assuming that a discovery converts to a licence on simple terms.

Who decides, and selling what you produce

The Mineral Rights Board that advises the Cabinet Secretary includes a chairperson appointed by the President, the Principal Secretaries for mining and for the National Treasury, a nominee of the Council of County Governors, the chairperson of the National Land Commission, the Director of Mines as secretary, and the Director of Geological Surveys. Selling is a separate permission. Nobody may deal in minerals as principal or agent without a mineral dealer’s licence or permit, except a mineral right holder dealing in what it lawfully produced, and no title passes on minerals disposed of outside the Act. The Ministry FAQ gives a mineral dealing licence at KSh 20,000 and a permit at KSh 2,000, both valid for a calendar year, with a permit allowing business within Kenya only and not exports, and with separate categories including precious metals.

How an application moves

Applicants register as users on the Online Mining Cadastre, log in, complete the application and upload the required documents. The licensing division confirms completeness and forwards the file to the Mineral Rights Board, which reviews it and advises the Cabinet Secretary to approve or reject. The Act gives 90 days for a complete application, and the department warns the period can be extended where an application is incomplete and more information is requested. Large-scale prospecting applicants must supply a programme, evidence of finances and experience, an environmental rehabilitation plan, and plans for employing Kenyans and buying local goods.

If you hold a boundary or are about to apply, you can draw it on mining.farmonaut.com, Map Your Mining Site or send it through our mining query form for a quote on a satellite screen.

The moratorium, the reforms and where Kenyan gold stands

Any plan for gold exploration in Kenya has to account for the moratorium, and it is the first thing to check. According to a Cabinet Secretary media brief of 4 October 2023, the government imposed a moratorium on new mineral rights in December 2019 to protect its interests and carry out reforms. During the moratorium it substantially completed a nationwide airborne geophysical survey, whose preliminary report identified 970 mineral occurrences, and began ground truthing and confirmatory work on them in 16 counties. It made the Online Mining Cadastre operational, issued stop orders to more than 3,000 illegal operations, and began formalising artisanal miners into marketing cooperatives, with more than 200 groups formalised and awaiting permits.

On 3 October 2023 Cabinet agreed a phased lifting. The brief says the moratorium was lifted on the minerals in its Annex 1, a list that includes construction and industrial minerals and, at number 54, gold, along with manganese and gemstones. Other minerals were classed as strategic under section 16 of the Act and are processed case by case under the Mining (Strategic Minerals) Regulations, 2017, and the strategic list in the brief does not include gold. The brief also says artisanal mining was decriminalised, that artisanal permits would be considered for miners in marketing cooperatives or groups, and that pending applicants had to update ownership records, bank statements, tax compliance certificates and programmes of work. The brief is from October 2023, so confirm the current position with the State Department before you rely on it.

The State Department’s Mining Sector Investment Pack gives gold an estimated value of about USD 250 million in 2025 and a projection of USD 600 to 800 million by 2030, and ties that growth to expansion of the Kakamega, Siaya, Vihiga and Migori gold projects, more exploration, formalisation of artisanal mining and better processing. It names an upcoming Kakamega gold processing plant and a Kakamega gold refinery, and a UN-backed five-year PlanetGOLD Kenya programme to formalise artisanal and small-scale gold mining and phase out mercury. Those are projections and plans, not outcomes, so read them as the direction of policy.

Gold in Kenya: the Nyanzian greenstones and western belts

The National Geodata Centre, built by the British Geological Survey and the Kenyan Geological Survey, summarises Kenyan geology in five successions: Archaean (Nyanzian and Kavirondian), Proterozoic (Mozambique Belt and Bukoban), Palaeozoic and Mesozoic sediments, and Tertiary and Quaternary volcanics and sediments. For gold in Kenya the Archaean succession in the west is the one that matters. The Nyanzian Super Group is described as shales, cherts, ironstones, pyroclastics, rhyolites, andesites and basalts, subjected to low-grade greenschist metamorphism and therefore called greenstones. Unusually for greenstone belts, the Nyanzian has relatively large amounts of andesite and rhyolite. It is mainly lavas and pyroclastics with minor sediments and banded iron formation, and the overlying Kavirondian is greywacke-argillite, tuff, arkose and conglomerate.

For gold exploration in Kenya, the Geodata Centre dates the Nyanzian and Kavirondian rocks, which make up the Nyanza Craton, at more than 3,100 million years, and says both are isoclinally folded about east-west trending axes and intruded by granitic bosses and batholiths. It says explicitly that in the Archaean Nyanzian craton area of western Kenya, metallic mineralisation of base and precious metals is known, and that gold, copper and silver have been mined in the past. The Proterozoic Kisii Group, mostly volcanics with sediments, forms an outlier over Kisii and Nyamira counties and unconformably overlies the Archaean rocks. Rocks of the Mozambique Belt cover much of the Coast, Eastern, Rift Valley and North Eastern regions and follow a north-south structural trend.

The USGS Minerals Yearbook for 2019 reports that artisanal and small-scale miners produced 395 kilograms of gold in 2019, down from 472 the year before and up almost threefold from 2015, mostly near Lake Victoria, and that additional production was likely unreported. It also notes that Kenya had no legal framework to formalise artisanal mining until the Mining Act 2016, which created mining permits for artisanal miners, and it estimates mercury emissions from artisanal and small-scale gold mining at about 2,100 kilograms a year. The Ministry’s investment pack names Kakamega, Siaya, Vihiga and Migori as the gold project areas, and the NGDC holds a special 1:15,000 map sheet for the Macalder mine.

What satellites can and cannot see in western Kenya

Western Kenya is humid highland and lakeshore country with smallholder farmland, so we expect cultivation and vegetation to cover much of the rock. We could not source a Kenya-specific land-cover figure for this page, so treat that as a field expectation, not a measured number. The practical message for gold exploration in Kenya is the same as in any covered greenstone terrain: use the surface layers for what they can show, and use geophysics for what they cannot.

• ✔ Structure and drainage. Lineaments, fold closures and stream offsets can be mapped from elevation and optical imagery wherever relief survives the cover, and the east-west fold trend gives a reference to test them against.
• 📊 Banded iron formation. Where BIF forms ridges it is easy to map from elevation and imagery, as it is in the neighbouring Tanzanian goldfield, but we have not verified which Kenyan ridges carry gold.
• Disturbed ground from artisanal workings, clearings and tracks, which shows fresh soil and extents of earlier activity.
• ⚠ Limits. Cultivation and thick regolith dampen alteration signals. A screen is a first pass that ranks ground for soil sampling, not a replacement for the national airborne survey data or for drilling.

Kenya cadastre, geodata and geological data

The Online Mining Cadastre is at portal.miningcadastre.go.ke, and registration there is the first step in an application. Our cadastre portal guide compares Kenya’s portal with others. The department’s licensing page lists the three-stage licensing process, registration of users and the registration of licences and permits as the last action.

For geological data, the National Geodata Centre is the authoritative repository. The Mining Act requires a national repository of geoscience information with public access, and the Centre, administered by the Directorate of Geological Surveys, holds digital copies of 83% of the Geological Survey bulletins, 95% of the geological map description reports, 83% of the memoirs and 225 geological maps at scales from the 1:1 million national map to the Macalder mine sheet. It also holds the 1:1 million geology and structural features, the mineral occurrence data, a national 250 metre elevation model and a 1971 airborne geophysical survey for the Kerio and north-east Kenya regions, and offers a GeoNetwork data catalogue. The Directorate of Geological Surveys also offers cartography, mineral identification and drilling hire. Check what the Centre holds over your polygon, including the new airborne data, before you assume coverage for gold exploration in Kenya.

Satellite screening for gold exploration in Kenya

You send us the boundary as a KML, KMZ or coordinates, with the country and target mineral. We choose multispectral or hyperspectral data, run the analysis and deliver in 5 to 20 business days, depending on area size and mineral complexity. Our satellite-based mineral detection flags likely mineralised zones, alteration halos and structures, and the premium report adds prospectivity heatmaps, high-potential zones with estimated location and depth ranges, geological interpretation and georeferenced GIS files. Premium+ adds TargetMax drilling intelligence and 3D subsurface models. We have also published a video about satellite gold exploration in Kenya that shows the process.

• ✔ Speed and cost. Satellite screening can lower early-exploration cost by up to 80 to 85% and cut timelines from months to days, compared with starting on the ground.
• 📊 Scope by tier. A two-block mining permit and a 1,500-block prospecting licence need very different screens, and we scope each one differently.
• See a typical deliverable in the 3D prospectivity mapping overview.
• ⚠ Not licensing or investment advice. We are not a licensing authority, and targets are exploration targets, not resources.

“A Kenyan prospecting licence gives up at least half its blocks at every renewal.”

A short checklist for gold exploration in Kenya

1. Pick the side of the line: permits for Kenyan-owned small operations, licences for larger programmes.
2. Register on the Online Mining Cadastre and check the current status of gold applications with the Licensing Division.
3. Map landownership and community land and plan for the 20-day consent replies.
4. Screen the polygon and compare it with the Geodata Centre’s maps and any airborne survey results.
5. Plan the renewal: at least half the blocks go at each prospecting renewal.

Frequently asked questions

Reviewed October 2026 against the Mining Act, 2016 text on the African Mining Legislation Atlas, the State Department for Mining FAQ, licensing and geological survey pages, the Cabinet Secretary media brief of 4 October 2023, the Mining Sector Investment Pack, the National Geodata Centre geology summary and database pages, and the USGS Minerals Yearbook for Kenya. Fees, block caps and the moratorium position change, so confirm with the State Department for Mining before you apply or pay. Targets are exploration targets, not resources. Nothing here is legal or investment advice.