The Navachab gold deposit is located in the Pan-African Damara Orogen and hosted by greenschist-amphibolite facies calc-silicates, marbles and volcaniclastic rocks. The rocks have been intruded by granite, pegmatite and aplitic dykes and have also been deformed into a series of alternating dome and basin-like structures.

The mineralisation at Navachab forms a sheet-like body which plunges at an angle of approximately 20° to the northwest. The mineralisation is predominantly hosted in a sheeted quartz vein set (approximately 60% of tonnage) and a replacement skarn (approximately 40% of tonnage). The mineralisation in the main pit is hosted by a northeast to southwest striking metamorphosed sequence of calc-silicates, marbles and volcaniclastic rocks that dip at 70° to the west. The gold is very fine-grained and associated with pyrrhotite and minor amounts of pyrite, chalcopyrite, arsenopyrite, sphalerite, maldonite and bismuthinite. An estimated 90% of the gold occurs as free gold and the remainder is present in minerals such as maldonite (Au2Bi). Silver is also present with a gold to silver ratio of approximately 15 to 1.

The total mining function, including drilling, blasting, loading, and haulage of ore and waste, is the responsibility of the mining contractor. The concept of a mining contractor, common in other parts of the world, was adopted because of the unfavourable impact on the viability of the project of the additional front-end capital needed for inhouse mining.

Navachab is mined as an open-pit mine with a CIP plant that has a production capacity of 120,000 tonnes per month (tpm). The plant includes mills, CIP and electro winning facilities. A dense-media separation (DMS) plant with a 200 tonnes per hour (tph) capacity was commissioned during 2010 and a portion of the CIP feed comes from this pre-concentration plant.

In view of the coarse nature of the vein-related gold and the fineness of the disseminated pyrrhotite hosted gold, plane tables were installed below the mill. The entire mill discharge passes over the tables, where a gold concentrate is produced. This concentrate is then passed over an endless belt, where further upgrading occurs. The endless-belt concentrate is leached in an intensive cyanid ation reactor.