London-listed Kavango Resources is prioritizing the expansion of high-grade gold production at Prospect 4, part of its Hillside project in Matabeleland, southern Zimbabwe.
Currently, contract miners are extracting high-grade gold on a small scale at Prospect 4, with the ore transported 20 km to the processing facility at the main Hillside site. However, production is constrained by traditional mining methods, the transportation distance, and the facility’s limited capacity of 40-50 tons per day (t/d).
To address these challenges and unlock the site’s potential, Kavango has partnered with a South African manufacturer to design a modular processing plant capable of handling 100-200 t/d of mineralized material. This scalable facility could be relocated to other projects if needed and expanded based on future technical economic assessment (TEA) findings.
Preliminary exploration at Prospect 4 has already been completed, with plans for additional drilling early next year. Four new drill holes, each 500-600 m deep, will investigate the continuity and depth of gold-bearing quartz-vein shears, with more than 12 subparallel vein sets identified so far.
Kavango CEO Ben Turney expressed optimism about the project’s progress, highlighting promising drill results such as a 2.53 m section grading 29.08 g/t gold in Hole SKDD001.
“We are advancing rapidly at the Hillside gold project, targeting an underground high-grade gold operation at Prospect 4,” Turney stated. “With resource drilling at Prospect 3 wrapping up, we’re ready to deploy our rigs to Prospect 4 for the next phase of exploration.”
In addition to resource drilling, Kavango plans to assay samples and conduct metallurgical tests, which will inform the TEA and the specifications for a new processing plant.
Turney emphasized that the proposed plant’s minimum capacity of 100 t/d, potentially scaling to 200 t/d, could be supported by production from Prospect 4. “The cash flow generated from this upgraded facility will fund further exploration and provide a pathway to significantly increase gold production at Kavango,” he added.
