One of our project activities is to let the mining industry know about the efforts of SENA to reach out to the artisanal miners who - with lack of training and caught in an informal economy - cause maybe unwillingly but with clear proof a lot of damage to the environment and to the image of the mining industry. Not that 100 % of the larger companies behave as "responsible corporate citizens", but in general they have better skilled staff and they adhere in general to the legislation in place. And some of them (see my blog posts on the Gramalote project and the efforts of Ashmont in Bolivar) do even better than just comply (Frank, I tried to get the links to those posts in, but not "skilled" enough yet on my side...).
Today we presented to one of the sector councils that SENA works with from the industry in order to get their input for skills the employers would like to see from the SENA graduates. Today's session was with representatives from the Colombian mining sector.
The meeting was in one of SENA's so-called "Techno Parques" which are applied research centers where SENA offers two year business incubator space to aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs (I also made a blog post about this center earlier). There are spaces with testing equipment:
And lots of computer access. Many of the start-up entrepreneurs (the majority being local university graduates rather than SENA graduates) work on software applications. The area offers a secure business environment with a professional ambience:
This poster says: we are SENA students, free thinkers, with a social conscience and critical thinking, leaders and entrepreneurs. It is all the time about creating an atmosphere and confidence...
Our presentation went well and resulted in a lively debate with good suggestions. We are "on the radar" of some more people in the Colombian private sector with the SENA /Canadian efforts.
Tonight I translated a 15 page document (one of the "terms of reference" for one of our sub-projects in the EFE program) from Spanish into English. Four more of those to go the coming days... :-)
Just visited an artisanal gold mining site here yesterday. An estimated 650,000 people are doing artisanal mining in Madagascar, a country where 92% are living off less than $2 a day. I should note that, unlike many mining projects, this was not mining on my company's concession or tailings (we mine nickel, so not very interesting for them) but does threaten our slurry pipeline going from our mine to our processing plant. it looks like miserable work with little returns. The big problems here are the number of children involved - there are schools in the south of the country with no students left as all the kids are mining. The other problem is the mining going on in national parks and protected areas, aided by the vacuum of government in this extended political-economic crisis which has lasted 3.5 years. As it result, here it is conservation NGOS, not mining companies who are most struck by the issue, especially in such a biodiversity hotspot. Fascinating but difficult issue.. http://www.asm-pace.org/images/documents/ASM%20Madagascar%20Report%20Toolkit.pdf
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback, Ben. It sounds even worse than some of the communities I visited in Colombia where also too many kids work, but where there is a bit more social organization. Difficult issues indeed partly generated of course by the fact that the world market pays good money for gold. However, those poor artisanal miners sell their products for very little money plus their process is not very effective, dangerous and also clearly a disaster for the environment. If a government can not step in to regulate it obviously is just a "wild west".... Cheers and good luck with your work!
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