Mine-of-the-future: How is Africa prepared from a mineral and mining engineering education perspective?

Abstract

The mining industry continues to be a major source of employment despite challenges faced by mining engineering graduates to get employment. The issue of skills shortage continues to be a major concern and it is perceived as a real threat to the future of mining. Although the industry has undergone several changes in terms technological advancements, it is further envisioned that the future-mine will rely on a highly skilled skeleton labour force with the ability to perform several tasks through automated and remote-controlled operations and monitoring. The industry is expected to be knowledge-driven through a database model that receives and sends information (environmental, mining production and mineral processing) to enable proactive decisions to be made from both operational and control room perspectives. The four main key focus areas of the mine-of-the-future have been identified as operating practices and technology; talent and leadership; partnership with key stakeholders; and governance. A significant question that arises is the preparedness of mining engineering education in Africa to address the vision of the mine-of-the-future in relation to these four focus areas.This paper explores mining engineering programs run in selected countries across four sub-regions in Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Morocco, Ghana and Tanzania). The selection of these countries was based on the criteria including percentage contribution of the country's mineral sector to its GDP; percentage share of the country's mineral exports in its total export; The rank of country's production/supply of mineral commodities in the world; political stability and resource governance index measurement. The universities chosen from each of these countries were based on the Cybermetrics Lab-CSIC university ranking system. Mining engineering programs from these countries were compared with mining engineering programs in two international countries (Canada and Australia).The paper demonstrates a need for an improvement in mining engineering education in Africa to meet the vision of the future-mine.