Why the Mining Sector?

Minerals are of crucial and cross-cutting relevance to all four quadrants of geopolitical influence, which I once singled out as technology, trade, military strength, and economic standing. We are witnessing an era of mineral-driven energy transition and Industrial Revolution, positioning mining as a sector of strategic interest in any modern economy. Strategic minerals face potential supply chain vulnerabilities as they shape key developments in security and defence, aerospace research, and any nation’s economic and technological standing. The so-called critical minerals’ combined demand is fast outpacing their supply as the demands of modern civilisation, especially on communication and energy technologies, trace a mineral-intensive trajectory.

Tin, tantalum, and tungsten (3Ts) fit both categories, whether we talk of strategic minerals or critical minerals. The list of these key minerals of strategic interest is broad and includes uranium, titanium, rare earth elements (REEs), cobalt, coltan, niobium, graphite, platinum group metals (PMGs – Ruthenium (Ru), Rhodium (Rh), Palladium (Pd), Osmium (Os), Iridium (Ir), Platinum (Pt)), lithium, nickel, copper, germanium, indium, chromium, fluorite, aluminium, and so on. The good news is that Africa has a rich reserve of these minerals. It is estimated that Africa is endowed with at least a third of the known global total of mineral reserves.

Sustainability Aspects: A Rich Heritage Traceable to Mining

Regarding sustainability, we are usually treated to the Club of Rome (1972) and the famous Limits to Growth, which made for an early championing of the sustainability agenda. Later on, in 1987, the Brundtland Report concretised sustainable development as a compelling concept. Agenda 21 followed in 1992, then the Millennium Declaration (2000), which then gave way to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2012 – effectively replacing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000, which expired in 2015.

However, few people would refer to the firm foundation of sustainability laid in #Freiberg in the 18th century and built upon the idea of sustainable forestry. This small German city boasts a historic association with #silver mining from the early 12th century. Thus, the eponymous name of Freiberg is Silver City/Silberstadt (German).

In 1713, the Chief Mining Officer of Saxony, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, promoted planned afforestation to avert the looming wood crisis caused by mining and smelting activities in Freiberg. Unsurprisingly, Freiberg hosts the world’s oldest university of mining, the Technical University and Mining Academy of Freiberg/Technische Universität #Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF – https://www.linkedin.com/school/tu-freiberg.de/). Founded in 1765, the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF) has established itself as a leading University of Resources.

Not surprisingly, a decade of international educational and research partnership between TUBAF and Taita Taveta University (TTU) has yielded several innovative research products in the form of actionable doctoral and master’s theses in mining and natural resource management. This milestone has been made possible under the DAAD-funded Kenyan-German Centre of Excellence for Mining, Environmental Engineering and Resource Management (CEMEREM), the 8th such centre of excellence in Africa and the first one focusing on postgraduate education in engineering and natural resource management. CEMEREM has brought together three collaborating universities: Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF), Taita Taveta University (TTU), and HTW-Dresden.

The Gap

The invariant fact is that an irreducible and whole-systems approach, which is at variance with analytical, siloed and granular approaches, is the main philosophy underpinning the sustainable development concept. Besides leaving no one behind, multistakeholder partnerships, interconnectedness and indivisibility, and inclusiveness and interdependence constitute the core principles of sustainable development. Africa’s Agenda 2063 and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are anchored on these salient principles.

The Africa Mining Vision (AMV) appreciates the diversity of the continent’s geography and mineral resource endowment on the one hand, and the diverse resource governance challenges on the other. Rightly, the AMV champions a knowledge-driven and broad-based approach to planning in the mining sector and addressing the diverse and complex resource governance challenges, which are stubborn, nonlinear, convoluted, and lack exact or absolute answers – hence posing a “wicked problem”, which is the elitist phraseology tagged to it by scholars. Systems thinking and the resulting system dynamics modelling approach, attributed to the seminal works of Jay Forrester and his successors, such as Donella Meadows and Barry Richmond, are a suitable application to this kind of problem.

Consequently, the long-standing gap in the mining sector has been the lack of an integrated and adaptable decision support model with the precise geospatial metrics needed for guiding policy and planning at strategic, regional and multisector scales with multistakeholder participation, an improvement over the common route of applying operations research limited to project-level risk and loss mitigation. It is this gap that a rather ambitious doctoral research project sponsored by the CEMEREM project sought to address at TUBAF, and it did so effectively.

What is TIMPM?

The cited research led to the development of the Taita-Taveta Integrated Mine Planning Model (TIMPM). This is the first attempt in Kenya (and Africa) at developing a comprehensive system-wide decision support model for long-term strategy and policy design in the mining sector, with a regional and multisector approach that goes beyond a single mining project and uses GIS technology to integrate geospatial metrics into a system dynamics model for scenario simulation and impact monitoring.

With 40 variables and 7 sectors spread across a spatial extent of 17,000 sq.km, TIMPM is detailed enough for easy replication across different geographies. It accommodates modifications in sector selection as dictated by unique local realities.

More about TIMPM will be shared using links from the TUBAF library and in the subsequent media interviews, conferences, and publications. Thus, curious researchers will be able to follow up on the recommendations for further research meant to improve TIMPM adaptively for enhanced decision support. With advances in AI and Big Data, TIMPM brings closer the overarching vision of institutionalising advanced multicriteria spatial decision support systems (MCSDSS) for knowledge-driven and broad-based mineral resource governance in Kenya and Africa at large.

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Lecturer, Enactus Patron Nashon Adero Taita Taveta University More blogs from this author

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