African Mining January - February 2019 | Page 34

Mining Indaba preview Africa is thriving with opportunity, as long as you are prepared to be open minded, creative, and flexible in the way you conduct business. The mining industry is certainly picking up. Exploration spend is on the rise and projects that were put on hold have secured funding to take their projects forward. showing that they are suitably qualified in these areas, but because of limited employment opportunities, these individuals are no longer ‘job ready’. The youth or school leavers are the ones who are not getting the opportunity to gain skills that can make them marketable and employable. The real challenge in Africa, in my view, is the shortage of human resources. Africa has many highly qualified professionals and a large contingent of unskilled labour. The shortage lies in-between; that is, skilled engineering labour and lower to mid- management or supervisory skills. I have seen many individuals with certificates It is important to find ways to engage communities, authorities, and stakeholders, whereby one can start generating a pool of resources during a mining feasibility study, for example. This will provide a pool of resources ready for the project execution and construction phases. One company that is taking the Breton Scott: head of projects and business development at ATI, and managing director of Bowline Breton Scott. lead in this area is the Artisan Training Institute, who is actively developing their modular training solutions where they are ‘taking training to the learners’, rather than ‘taking the learners to the training’. Corruption remains a significant challenge in Africa, especially in politically volatile areas. This problem is often facilitated by a lack of transparency in the processes relating to exploration and mining rights — which can often put off investors whose shareholders and other stakeholders demand high standards of reporting, compliance, and risk management. West Africa seems to be an exciting prospect, though. Many of West Africa’s mining countries have shown improved risk ratings — including Senegal, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria — and we have seen some interest from both governments and investors in these countries. Our approach as a company is to support our clients wherever they go, and we expect to remain involved with them in this region and others. Some of our most innovative recent work has been with governments in West Africa who are looking to improve their attractiveness to investors. While the performance of South Africa’s mining sector has been disappointing in recent years, there is renewed optimism going forward due to better relationships being built between the industry and government. The DRC was particularly 32 AFRICAN MINING JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2019 William Joughin: chairman and principal mining geotechnical engineer, SRK Consulting William Joughin. disappointing, with changes to the mining code and subsequent investor unhappiness; Zimbabwe has improved, but cashflow is a problem. b www.africanmining.co.za