Training pays off

The hero in this short post is the man with the yellow helmet. He did many years of informal and untrained mining before he started following training programs on mining safety offered by SENA in the municipality of Barranco de Loba. It changed his life and professional behaviour. From being an informal (and most of the time illegal) miner, he turned his small business into a formal business, found some legal investors and changed his operation in a relatively clean mining business.

In the entrance area of his small scale operation he has all the materials he learned from SENA about mining safety for his staff. From a one person operation he grew his business to about 15 staff. His daugther trained with SENA for accountant and she organizes the books of his company now.

My colleagues of SENA were so proud seeing the results of their training. Below a few photos of his small scale gold mining operation starting with a properly constructed mine shaft (under an angle for better stability) and his older seperation machines to start the seperation of the gold from the rocks:

 

The rocks are now transported to the surface in a mechanized way (in comparison with miners having the carry the rocks up; still done in the majority of informal mines), and then they are processed in a new process which uses much less mercury and catches the waste water (in comparison with just letting it flow away towards the river as we saw in the post on Minas Santa Cuz).

Clean mining can be done. And it needs to be done in rural Colombia before the pollution reaches levels for which generations of future Colombians will pay for with very high public health bills.

Education and training pay off. Our hero of this post is proving it every day.... !