Our Stories
Summer School Builds Capacity in Environmental Management
August 4, 2022
B2Gold’s Otjikoto Summer School (BOSS) aims to build the capacity of its own staff and university students alike.
The program offers the students much-needed mining industry experience through exposure to the realities of environmental management.
The B2Gold team steers the initiative by developing and facilitating program content and by hosting the students at the Otjikoto Nature Reserve Education Centre.
The University of Namibia (UNAM) and the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) recommend promising students for participation, and for BOSS 2021 a professor from NUST contributed as a guest lecturer.
CENTRED ON MINE REHABILITATION
In BOSS sessions to date, activities have been firmly focused on improving the approaches to mine rehabilitation and closure.
When “school is in session”, objectives are set and research questions are formulated, followed by extensive fieldwork and data collection. Once the data has been analyzed, it is presented to the Otjikoto Mine Management with “real” recommendations that can be incorporated into the actual Otjikoto rehabilitation program.
A TWO-WAY STREET
According to Miya Kabajani, Research and Rehabilitation Coordinator at B2Gold Namibia, the Environmental department benefits just as much as the students in this reciprocal arrangement. “Some of the data collection objectives we identified at the start of our session, such as mapping vegetation zones of the mine site and assessing the progression of rehabilitated areas, have provided much-needed information for the improvement of our mine rehabilitation techniques and planning for closure.”
Twelve students attended BOSS in 2019, six in 2021, and 12 are expected to attend in 2022.
