Mining Insights: four small-cap gold stocks

With the gold price still around $5,000 an ounce and geopolitics unsettling global stock markets, we headed back to Cape Town to the largest mining investment event in Africa. At the Mining Indaba 2026, we received progress reports and insightful analysis from some exciting UK-listed gold miners.

• Invest with ii: Open an ISA | ISA Investment Ideas | ISA Offers & Cashback

Harry Anagnostaras-Adams, executive chair, KEFI Gold and Copper: It’s a pretty significant moment you’re choosing to interview me because KEFI Gold and Copper (LSE:KEFI) entered the Arabian-Nubian Shield 17, 18 years ago and Saudi Arabia were invited in by a large conglomerate and were the first to have made modern discoveries in Saudi and they’re in the development pipeline now, those projects.

But of particular note today is that we were invited also into Ethiopia. So, this is a particularly high-margin project. Revenue today, if today was year one, would be close to $1 billion. It would pay all its debt within12 months and we’d be paying dividends within 12 months.

Louis Castro, executive chair, Orosur Mining: Orosur Mining Inc (LSE:OMI) PLC has a market capital around £100-£120 million right now.

We’ve got two projects in South America. We really are about South America and gold. We’re in Colombia and in Argentina. Both are about 300 square kilometres, so quite a lot of land there, and we have 100% of each project.

We’ve been particularly busy in Colombia, where we are just releasing maiden resource for one of the four prospects we’ve got on these titles that we’ve got. In Pepas, we’re going to be moving very quickly into an economic assessment, and we should be producing that in next four to five months. 

And we’re moving into permitting. We’re looking at producing a small mine. It’s absolutely on the right spot. Top of the mountain, no strip ratio, very close to power, very close to the roads. At today’s price we’ve got about a $1 billion of gold in that small deposit.

To the south of there in the land mass that we have, we have the APTA prospect and that’s going to be bigger than Pepas. Now that’s going to be underground, whereas Pepas is open pit. So, the economics will be different, but given that we’re going to have more ounces, they should compensate. That could be happening in the next 12 months, so we’ve got quite a lot happening in development, if you like.

• Mining Insights: global trends in critical metals
• Don’t write off gold after tip to hit $6,000 in 2026

Werner Klingenberg, CEO, Goldplat: We are African and South American-focused gold recovery business. Basically, a mining service is provided that extracts value from byproducts and sometimes waste of the primary industry. Whether that’s historical or whether it’s current operating mines.

We obviously visit and determine what type of waste they generate that’s still gold-bearing and sometimes got PGMs (platinum group metals) in it. We then propose unique solutions through our niche plants based in South Africa, as well as in Ghana, to see if we can provide economical solutions to extract that value, return some of that to us, and obviously keep some of that to ourselves. 

We are looking at expanding our operating footprint into Brazil and South America, but we have been quite successful over the last seven years to source material out of there and we’re looking forward to seeing how we can expand in terms of growth and the relationships with the bidder there. 

As any other gold company, we had the headwinds of the gold price, specifically the increasing gold price that assisted us, but we also saw the results of continued efforts over the last quarters and we’ve seen good volumes that’s coming through. I’m looking forward to sharing a bit more detail with the market soon.

Bert Munro, CEO, Cora Gold: Cora Gold Ltd Ordinary Shares (LSE:CORA) is an AIM-listed gold company. Our focus is predominantly in Mali, but we’ve also got an asset in Senegal as well. Our main asset is called Sanankoro. It’s a million ounce-plus oxide gold deposit.

We have completed a really positive feasibility study on the project, which shows 10 years of reserve life, a significant amount of free cash flow, depending on what gold price you use. Our study was done at just under $3,000 gold. Obviously, it’s moved on a long way from there. It’s a very straightforward project. It’s an open-pit oxide project, so it’s gravity CIL (carbon-in-leach) processing from the free digging open pit mining. So, lots of positives about the project getting to production.

So, we’ve developed up the resource, we’ve got a reserve, we’ve got a completed feasibility study, we’ve also got an environmental permit on the project. So, we currently are awaiting the mining permit for the project and then we’re ready to get building. 

We’ve got a project team in place who are there to support building us and we’ve obviously got good relationships with EPCM (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction Management) providers and other contractors as well to get up and running quickly.

• Where investment professionals are investing their ISA
• Sign up to our free newsletter for investment ideas, latest news and award-winning analysis

I think the massive attraction for Cora is that you’ve got a huge amount of leverage into the gold price. You’ve got a large gold deposit at a million ounces, which has been very under-explored. So, we believe we’ll significantly increase our resources in the future. You’ve got a build-ready project with extremely robust economics.

I think that combined with obviously funding partners in place, shows that we’ve got a huge amount of upside and a lot of exciting months ahead as we make progress.