Overview

The Republic of Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the continent of Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers.  Today, it is governed by a National Unity government, represented by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC party and President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF.

The mining industry plays an important role in Zimbabwe, contributing approximately 8% towards the country’s GDP.  It therefore has a well established mining law and a mining culture that extends back centuries to the ancient gold workings of Old Zimbabwe.  It also has an infrastructure and a skill-base almost unrivalled in Africa.  Gold is the country’s most important mineral commodity, having first been discovered there in mid to late 1800s, however other mineral resources include, coal, chromium, asbestos, nickel, copper, iron ore, vanadium, lithium, tin and platinum. 

The Zimbabwe Craton, as the local remnant of the Archaean Shield is known, is comparable in size and make-up to the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia.  There is a large divergence between the exploration and exploitation level of the Zimbabwean Greenstone Belt and other Greenstone belts in the world's Archean Shields.  This divergence began with the dramatic technology-based production uplift engineered by Western Australian and Canadian producers in the 1970s and 1980s.  Zimbabwe, although the No 5 gold producer in the world in 1975, ahead of Australia, has yet to enjoy any uplift of the kind which saw West Australian production rise some 35-fold in the 13 years after 1972.

Since 1998 gold production has declined due to both the lack of foreign investment and the application of modern exploration techniques, which have been applied successfully to Archaean greenstone belts in other parts of the world.  By applying these new techniques, the potential for new gold discoveries is enormous.