Back to working on gold

Our project in Colombia aims to increase the capacity of the national training organization SENA to reach out in remote areas of the country with applied education programs. In our specific project we will concentrate on training programs for small scale gold mining, small scale rural agriculture (in the same areas where the small scale gold mining takes place), water treatment and entrepreneurship (to transform existing informal small production units into formal businesses). One of the main problems in the small scale gold mining is the use of the chemical mercury (to get the gold away from the rocks). The way it is used is not only relatively inefficient (they get a maximum of about 40% of the potential gold from the rocks that way), but also a real threat for public health and the environment.

Above a statistic which shows that after the large countries of China and Indonesia, Colombia has a lot of contamination taking place through the use of mercury in gold mining. And if you realize that the gold mining in Colombia has barely began in seriousness, the threat is very real and large.

Our project "Education for Employment" (EFE) hopes to give an additional impulse to stimulate alternative uses of appropriate technology in Colombia for the small scale mining operations. SENA trains a lot of Colombians (about 7 million each year) with short courses of as little as 40 hours up to diploma programs of two years. They have not yet been able to do much in the sector of mineral mining, and our EFE program will launch an important increase in that activity.

The coming weeks we will have some visits of Canadian colleagues (for annual project steering committee meetings) and visits to our project target/pilot communities. During September and October we will have a call for expressions of interest to participate in this program for all the member institutions in Canada who are member of the ACCC (Association of Canadian Community Colleges), we will have a few special Canadian experts conducting workshops, and we will organize a workshop on "gender mainstreaming" by a Colombian expert. In November we hope to complete the selection of the Canadian colleges for the five sub-projects of our EFE program in Colombia, and then we can start in serious with the project/program implementation during 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Greetings from your friend and for-ever optimist. On we go. Step by step. Paso por paso....