Anyone planning gold exploration in Zimbabwe deals with two very different systems. One is a pegging-and-registration regime built in 1961 that still decides who owns a claim. The other is the geology, which has produced gold for well over a century and still does. The paperwork tells you whether you can hold the ground. A satellite screen, read alongside the geological survey record, tells you where on that ground the structures and alteration worth testing are likely to sit.

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The timing is interesting for gold exploration in Zimbabwe. Official deliveries to the national refinery reached a record 46.7 tonnes in 2025, according to the Financial Gazette, and the Minister of Mines has said a national airborne geophysical survey is “on the cusp”. Meanwhile the legal framework is changing: a Mines and Minerals Bill was gazetted in 2025 to replace the 1961 Act, and the Ministry has been digitising its title records. Whoever is exploring now is working across both the old and the new systems.

“Zimbabwe’s ministry has said the country has about six million hectares of largely unexplored prospective ground.”

How gold exploration in Zimbabwe is titled: licences, blocks and EPOs

The Mines and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05] vests the right to search for and mine minerals in the President, and the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development administers it through mining commissioners in each district. The text below follows the Act as published on the African Mining Legislation Atlas, which carries amendments up to 2002, and the explainers cited. A Mines and Minerals Bill gazetted in 2025 would repeal and replace the Act, add a Mining Cadastre Register and tighten rules for prospectors. Check which version applies before you file anything, because gold exploration in Zimbabwe is currently carried out under a law that is mid-reform.

The small-scale route: prospecting licence, then a block

Any permanent resident of Zimbabwe, or an appointed agent, can take out a prospecting licence at the office of a mining commissioner. It is valid until the second anniversary of issue, the holder must be at least 18, and it cannot be sold. Before working on fenced private land, communal land, town land or a demarcated forest, the holder has to give written notice to the owner, occupier, rural district council or Forestry Commission, and that notice lasts 120 days unless a block has been pegged.

Gold is a precious metal under the Act, so a gold claim is pegged as a block of up to ten claims. In regular form the ten-claim block is a parallelogram of no more than 500 metres by 200 metres, which is 10 hectares, with each claim extending at most 50 metres along the line of reef. After a discovery the holder has 31 days from posting the prospecting notice to peg the block and post a registration notice, or 90 days where the discovery came from a borehole. Miss the window and the rights are treated as abandoned. That is the practical shape of small-scale gold exploration in Zimbabwe: a licence, a discovery, then a race against a statutory clock. Once a certificate of registration issues, the pegs must be replaced with stone or concrete beacons within two calendar months. One practitioner explainer gives three months, so confirm the current figure at the mining office.

Many small operators work through an approved prospector. Under the Act, a person can register as an approved prospector, the registration lasts five years and can be renewed once for a further five, and a prospecting licence holder can appoint an approved prospector in writing to act as their representative. Applications to renew must be made at least two months before expiry. If you are paying someone to peg for you, ask to see their registration certificate and check it is current.

The explorer route: Exclusive Prospecting Orders and special grants

An Exclusive Prospecting Order, or EPO, gives exclusive rights to prospect for named minerals in an identified area. Applicants write to the Mining Affairs Board, which can recommend an order to the Minister if it considers the applicant a fit and proper person with adequate financial standing. The President can authorise or refuse, the Minister issues it, and the order is published in the Government Gazette. An order runs for up to three years and can be extended once by up to three more. The applicant must set out a programme of prospecting for the first six months. Rights are personal to the holder and cannot be transferred without the Minister’s written permission. For larger-scale gold exploration in Zimbabwe, the EPO is the usual vehicle.

The Act caps standard orders at 65,000 hectares, 130,000 hectares if solely for coal, oil or gas, and 2,600 hectares for orders that include precious stones other than diamonds. It also bars orders below 2,600 hectares unless they are solely for precious metals or precious stones, which is the carve-out that makes a small gold EPO possible. Separately, the Secretary can issue special grants over ground that has been reserved against prospecting and pegging.

Land access shapes gold exploration in Zimbabwe as much as geology does. Under section 31 of the Act, a prospecting licence, special grant or EPO holder may not work within 450 metres of a principal homestead, on land under cultivation or within 15 metres of it, within 90 metres of a cattle dip tank, or within town limits, without the landowner’s written consent. On holdings of 100 hectares or less, owner consent is needed to prospect at all. A recent satellite scene shows cultivation and homesteads more clearly than a desk map ever will.

Work out your blocks and your EPO coverage

A worked example: a 2,600 hectare order

Take the smallest standard EPO the Act allows, 2,600 hectares, and suppose you plan to hold it for four years. That fits within one initial term of three years plus an extension, so you would need to apply for the extension in good time. If a satellite screen ranks 15% of the area as priority ground, that is 390 hectares, or 39 ten-claim gold blocks if you later peg it. A block cannot exceed 500 metres by 200 metres, so a 390-hectare corridor has to be broken into many parallelograms along strike. The shapes matter as much as the total.

That is why we like to deliver zones as polygons that a mine surveyor can turn into pegging lines, not as a heat map alone. In gold exploration in Zimbabwe, where the legal unit is a long thin block along a reef, a target that cannot be pegged is a target that cannot be protected.

If you already hold a block group or an EPO area, you can draw the boundary on mining.farmonaut.com, Map Your Mining Site or send it through our mining query form to get a quote for a satellite screen.

From licence to registered block

The Afriwise summary of the 2025 Bill says it would restructure the Mining Affairs Board, create a Mining Cadastre Register and impose stricter rules on prospectors, and it urges stakeholders to take part in the legislative process, which suggests the Bill had not been enacted when it was written. The same note records that the ministry’s coordinate requirement applies from 1 July 2025 and is not a requirement to re-peg claims.

Zimbabwe gold: the greenstone belts

Zimbabwe gold comes almost entirely from greenstone belts, strips of volcanic and sedimentary rock caught between granites across the Zimbabwe craton. A 1993 review of Archaean lode gold in Africa, published in Ore Geology Reviews, notes that dilational vein and brittle-to-ductile shear zone mineralisation is common on the craton, with gold distribution controlled by the permeability of the hydrothermal conduits and the competence and chemistry of the wall rocks, and links gold metallogeny to the tectonothermal events around 2.6 to 2.5 billion years ago that stabilised the craton. For explorers the practical message is that structure matters more than lithology alone, and every programme of gold exploration in Zimbabwe starts from that structural fabric.

Midlands belt: Kadoma, Kwekwe and Shurugwi

The Midlands belt is the best documented. A Geological Society study of the Kadoma region ties gold to a late Archaean shear system linked to the Limpopo belt, where early north-north-west compression produced folds and thrusts that later evolved into transpressive shear zones. A more recent paper on the Golden Valley field reports that most deposits there are controlled by arc-shaped faults forming a semicircular structure about 9 by 11 kilometres. That is the kind of pattern a good satellite lineament map can pick up.

Harare-Bindura-Shamva and Mutare

Published descriptions put the Harare-Bindura-Shamva belt among the largest on the craton, up to about 140 km by 80 km, with quartz reefs structurally controlled by reverse shear zones. In the Mutare belt near Penhalonga, a regional study reports that more than 90% of known gold occurrences lie in fractures and shear zones parallel to the regional fold axis, and more than half are in ultramafic and mafic metavolcanics. Both are good illustrations of why we map structure first.

Gwanda, Bulawayo and Filabusi in Matabeleland

South-west of the Midlands, the Gwanda, Bulawayo and Filabusi belts also carry long production histories. A 1996 University of Southampton thesis combined wet- and dry-season Landsat imagery, aeromagnetic and gravity data over the Gwanda greenstone belt and found at least four fracture sets, which it linked to Archaean deformation and later tectonic activity. We have not verified current resource figures for mines on any of these belts, so we do not quote them.

How much Zimbabwe gold is delivered, and where the unexplored ground is

Official gold deliveries to Fidelity Gold Refinery reached 46.7 tonnes in 2025, up 28% on the previous year, the Financial Gazette reported, which implies roughly 36.5 tonnes in 2024. The Herald, citing refinery data, put 2024 at 36.48 tonnes against 30.1 in 2023. Deliveries measure what reaches the refinery, not total mine output, so treat them as a floor.

Who delivers it

For the nine months to September 2024, Herald coverage of refinery data put small-scale deliveries at 14.5 tonnes and primary producers at 9.6 tonnes, out of a national total of 24.1 tonnes. Small-scale miners have long supplied the larger share. That is the audience for much of what follows: people holding single blocks or small groups of claims who need to decide where to dig next without paying for a full geophysical programme.

The permanent secretary in the Ministry of Mines told the same Financial Gazette report that the country has about six million hectares of largely unexplored prospective ground that could support 100 tonnes a year with more exploration. That is an official aspiration, not a forecast. It does indicate where the state wants private exploration to go, and it matches the airborne survey the Minister described.

What satellites can and cannot see in Zimbabwe’s greenstone belts

Zimbabwe is kinder to optical satellites than most of West Africa. Much of the craton has a long dry season, so scenes taken near its end show less green vegetation and more exposed soil and rock. We still have to be careful about three things when we screen for gold exploration in Zimbabwe.

Lineaments are not all shears

A 1987 British Geological Survey report on lineaments in Masvingo Province compared lineaments interpreted from enhanced Landsat imagery with fractures measured in the field. It found only a partial correlation between the main lineament directions and the steep, closed joints typical of granite outcrops, which it attributed to stress release during erosional unloading, and a better correlation with older quartz-cemented shears and minor faults. That is a useful warning from the craton itself. A lineament map is a list of candidates, and a field geologist or a geophysical survey decides which ones carry gold-bearing shears.

Cover, cultivation and seasons

• ✔ Dry-season exposure. Multi-date imagery across seasons is standard practice, and the Gwanda thesis above used both wet and dry season scenes.
• 📊 Cultivated and settled ground. Section 31 of the Act removes cropped land and the zone around homesteads from prospecting without consent, and satellite imagery shows both.
• Old workings and spoil heaps from a century of mining are visible as disturbed ground, which helps separate virgin ground from re-worked areas.
• ⚠ Cover and laterite. A published Farmonaut case study notes that the surface signal weakens under cover, thick laterite or dense canopy, and that depth is modelled, not measured.

What a satellite cannot do

Satellites map iron oxides, clays, silica and structure at the surface. They do not detect gold, grade or tonnage. In gold exploration in Zimbabwe, as in a typical orogenic gold setting elsewhere, those surface features are the expression of fluid flow along a shear, and they point to where to sample first. They do not replace soil lines, mapping and drilling, and they are not a resource under any reporting code.

Zimbabwe cadastre, coordinates and geological data

The ministry’s digital cadastre is still being rolled out. On 1 July 2026 New Zimbabwe, republished by AllAfrica, reported that the Minister had briefed Cabinet on a platform to replace paper-based title registration, and that the ministry holds a repository of more than 60,000 titles including blocks of claims, special grants, mining leases and EPOs. Until it is fully live, searches and applications go through the provincial mining offices. Our cadastre portal guide tracks the position as portals open.

For geology, the Zimbabwe Geological Survey is the official source for gold exploration in Zimbabwe. Published reports describe bulletins, mineral resources series and maps sold through the Survey’s offices in Causeway, Harare, but we could not verify a current catalogue or price list, and the Minister acknowledged in 2026 that some maps in use rely on information about 40 years old. A national airborne magnetic and electromagnetic survey is planned, not delivered. Ask the Survey what coverage exists over your polygon, and in what format, before assuming any dataset is available. The British Geological Survey, working with the Zimbabwe Geological Survey, has also published open GIS data for Zimbabwe on Zenodo, with SRTM elevation, Sentinel-2 imagery and OpenStreetMap, which is a free starting point for base mapping.

Satellite screening for gold exploration in Zimbabwe: claims and EPOs

You send us the boundary as a KML, KMZ or coordinates, plus the country and target mineral. We choose multispectral or hyperspectral data, run our 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 deliverables include 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 published two anonymised Zimbabwe case studies, both on greenstone-belt licences with the district and boundary withheld. One was a sub-100 hectare licence where the client reported that the screen narrowed down where to explore or drill and chose banded answers of six months or more saved and up to USD 25,000 saved, with drilling planned. The other was a roughly 300 hectare licence where the client reported drilling the targets and encountering mineralisation, with the laboratory assay still pending. Those are client-reported, banded and unaudited figures, they are not grade or resource claims, and they do not predict your result.

• ✔ Cost and time. 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.
• 📊 Start here. Draw your boundary on mining.farmonaut.com, Map Your Mining Site or send it through the mining query form.
• See what a deliverable looks like in the 3D prospectivity mapping overview.
• ⚠ Boundaries. We are not a licensing agent, surveyor or legal adviser. A mine surveyor still has to capture the coordinates your title needs.

“In a ten-claim Zimbabwe gold block the ground you can hold is capped at 10 hectares, so every hectare you peg should be chosen.”

A short checklist for gold exploration in Zimbabwe

1. Confirm who holds the ground with the provincial mining office, and ask for the latest cadastre status.
2. Choose the route: a prospecting licence and blocks for a small project, an EPO for a larger area.
3. Check the exclusions in section 31: cultivated land, homestead buffers and town limits.
4. Screen the polygon and compare the structure map with the known shear fabric of the belt.
5. Have a mine surveyor capture coordinates in UTM Arc 1950 on the Clarke 1880 spheroid, as the ministry now requires.

Frequently asked questions

Reviewed October 2026 against the Mines and Minerals Act text on the African Mining Legislation Atlas, the Financial Gazette report of 25 June 2026, New Zimbabwe’s cadastre report of 1 July 2026, the Afriwise note on the Mines and Minerals Bill and General Notice 01 of 2025, Mining Index Zimbabwe guides, the British Geological Survey Masvingo lineament report and published Zimbabwe craton geology abstracts. Fees, the effect of the 2025 Bill, current coordinate rules and cadastre status change, so confirm with the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development before you peg or file. Targets are exploration targets, not resources. Nothing here is legal or investment advice.