Mining Engineering

“Organised thoughts, when reviewed for veracity and compelling philosophy,
then immortalised in books, present humanity the timeless opportunity to pass
on knowledge and share experiences while influencing a mindset change —
intergenerationally,” Nashon Juma Adero on the priceless value of good books.
Anno Remedio. COVID-proofing. Doomscrolling. Infodemic. Panic shopping.
Pandemic versus plandemic. Pandemic fatigue. Post-pandemic resilience. Recovery
roadmap. Reimagination. Reinvention. Remotopia. Social distancing. Super-spreaders. Vaccine equity. Vaccine hesitancy and scepticism. Vaccine nationalism.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has made these keywords rise to the top of popular
discourse since it began ravaging the world in early 2020. Organised thoughts,
when reviewed for veracity and compelling philosophy, then immortalised in
books, present humanity the timeless opportunity to pass on knowledge and share
experiences while influencing a mindset change - intergenerationally. The Future of
Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World is such a timely book, now in your hands.
The COVID-19 pandemic has a singular message for Africa and her future. For her
undisputedly weaker infrastructure and health systems by world standards, Africa
has posted a performance streak that goes against the previous grim expectations.
Africa’s 17% share of the global population but only 3.3% of the global COVID-19
cases and 3.5% of the global death cases by December 11, 2020 add weight to the
continent’s reported fair performance record. Africa’s multilateral response to the
pandemic has involved the African Union, Africa Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), the Africa Joint Continental Strategy for COVID-19 Outbreak,
the Partnership to Accelerate COVID-19 Testing (PACT), and the African Union
COVID-19 Fund.
Africa must not mistake this relative escape from the worst hit by the pandemic for
a final victory. A peek at the continent’s lost school calendar, for example, confirms
how the pandemic has shoved the continent’s education sector to the dark side of
the digital divide. A growing challenge, therefore, remains in building institutions
and systems that can assure adaptive resilience to similar emergencies and
disasters, which are bound to be more frequent in a connected world experiencing
increasing pressures from human activities, urbanisation, and population growth.
Africa’s post-pandemic future cannot be divorced from the data-driven digital
transformation wave and the accompanying generational succession by youthful
digital natives embracing a borderless worldview. It is a future increasingly
demanding of institutional strengthening and a collaborative systems approach to
solving common and foremost challenges, such as: healthcare, quality education
focused on employability skills and job creation, infrastructure development,
food security, energy security, and water security. The chapters of this book have
explored the key thematic areas Africa needs to focus on for competitiveness and
viii The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World
post-pandemic resilience. The authors were drawn from universities, industry,
government, and civil society. The papers, from different disciplinary backgrounds
and affiliations, were double-blind peer-reviewed to ensure the quality standards
of modern authorship and scholarly debates. Papers sharing mostly independent
but informed author opinions were also accepted after the review process and
allocated their own section as opinion articles in the book. The 10th East Africa
Thought Leaders Forum held virtually on August 26, 2020, added another layer of
review as the authors shared their topics for scrutiny in a laboratory of democratic
criticism. Universities demonstrated leadership by participating actively in the
generative debates and subsequent contributions that led to this publication.
We appreciate the assiduous teamwork that yielded this book, within IREN and
beyond. It is our hope that you will find this book a liberating elixir loaded with
empowering messages for a recovering and rising continent.
Nashon Juma Adero and Josephat Juma
Editors of The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World

The trend of urbanization and population growth has exerted excessive pressure on natural capital, with scientific evidence showing an overshoot beyond sustainable limits. Ensuring ecologically sustainable cities and metropolitan regions with a high quality of life is a prime development goal, in Kenya and worldwide. The proportional contribution of the construction sector to environmental degradation has been estimated at a global average of 30 per cent to 40 per cent. This study reviewed existing best practices, conceptual frameworks, and empirical evidence of the benefits of environmentally sound and sustainable building and construction. It applied a weighted summation model and additive utility concepts in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) to analyze the views of Kenyan stakeholders on the relative importance of nine selected environmental criteria and ten commonly applied strategies for environmentally sustainable building and construction. Slum upgrading, regeneration of ...

KIPPRA recently shared with stakeholders the results of a pilot study on metropolitan governance. This took place during the Metropolitan Service Level Mapping and Social Accountability Summit held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies on 21 st June 2012. Stakeholders came from all the 15 local authorities in the wider Nairobi and its neighbouring regions. The pilot study was conducted in the Municipal Council of Mavoko as part of laying ground for best practice in metropolitan governance in Kenya. This particular study was on service level mapping, a central foundation to the other four project components on effective metropolitan governance, funded through the Rockefeller Foundation. Enhancing citizen participation: A critical requirement in metropolitan governance Under Kenya's new constitutional dispensation, citizens' quest for quality, transparency, and equity in access to various county or sub-national services has grown stronger than ever. Over the years, around th...

The cost of doing business in the East African Community (EAC) is very high relative to other regional blocs. The poor state of regional transport infrastructure and sub-optimal mix of transport modes contribute substantially to this unfavourable fact. This paper used comparative indicators to assess the performance of transport infrastructure in the EAC, middle-level economies and other major players in Africa. It highlighted the key transport master plans in the region and interventions needed for integrated, efficient, and effective regional transport infrastructure network. For greater synergy, the need to construct and invigorate missing and weak links featured strongly. The outcome of this assessment is multifaceted. With respect to particular transport modes, extending pipeline infrastructure in the region promises increased cost-effectiveness and safety in transporting petroleum products. Similar benefits apply to railway infrastructure which, if extended and modernized, wil...

Background: This article discusses the approach to the implementation of the project for the extraction and the methodology of preliminary processing of the obtained data with the aim of centralized accumulation for collective multipurpose use of the databank on the example of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere by air transport for a given territory. It should be noted that on the basis of morphological analysis, processing, as well as the classification of spatial objects of the geodatabase and additional information, it is subsequently possible to organize, for example, a system of geoecological monitoring.Methods: At the fundamental level, the research used integration and process-based approaches, the method of extrapolation, expert methods of evaluation, random selection and analytical comparisons, a set of methods of spatial analysis based on various instruments and sources. In this study are used of open standards OGC, web, GIS technologies and the Internet for the ...

Nurturing innovative thinkers is a key variable in the equation of transforming leadership in Africa. Developing skills for critical thinking and problem solving is essential to enhancing the continent’s intellectual capital. Research findings concur that technological innovation capacity is the primary engine for wealth creation, and the means by which increasing development demands can be met against the limited carrying capacity of the planet. This challenge not only invokes policy measures to enhance innovation capacity, but also evokes questions on the extent to which basic education is socialised and managed in Africa to empower learners to become creative thinkers who can transform the continent’s leadership. A cross-country survey in 2014 and 2015 of key informants, mostly drawn from Africa, informed the paradigm shift in pedagogy needed to promote innovation for transformed leadership. A synthesis of the results compared the degree of emphasis placed on training specific skills to the perceived potential of these skills to instigate innovation. The factors that inform student choices of degree programmes were also studied. Systems thinking skills, scientific inquiry, communication skills, and spatial intelligence emerged to be the most valued skills for innovation, yet the prevailing pedagogy hardly emphasises these skills from the basic education level. Training was observed to be more emphatic on reading, writing, and numeracy skills. These skills were, however, ranked as weaker contributors to innovation capacity. Skills for employment outweighed skills for job creation as a decision factor when students are choosing training programmes. The prevailing emphasis of curricular activities is therefore skewed unfavourably against innovation capacity, hence limiting the production of innovative leaders. These findings place an urgent demand on Africa to ensure curricular activities place more emphasis on imparting innovation-oriented skills, especially systems thinking, scientific inquiry, communication skills, and spatial intelligence.

The trend of urbanization and population growth has exerted excessive pressure on natural capital, with scientific evidence showing an overshoot beyond sustainable limits. Ensuring ecologically sustainable cities and metropolitan regions with a high quality of life is a prime development goal, in Kenya and worldwide. The proportional contribution of the construction sector to environmental degradation has been estimated at a global average of 30 per cent to 40 per cent. This study reviewed existing best practices, conceptual frameworks, and empirical evidence of the benefits of environmentally sound and sustainable building and construction. It applied a weighted summation model and additive utility concepts in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) to analyze the views of Kenyan stakeholders on the relative importance of nine selected environmental criteria and ten commonly applied strategies for environmentally sustainable building and construction. Slum upgrading, regeneration of ...

This lightning talk will share experiences on how social media communication (mainly Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and YouTube) has accelerated the institutionalisation of a spatial-thinking culture in a Kenyan rural setting. This has led to a growing appreciation of the role of GIS in enhancing multistakeholder dialogue and transforming outcomes in the science-society-policy nexus. The setting brings together a young university, the local government, and the local community inhabiting a vast mineral-rich region. Here, mining, agriculture, wildlife conservation, and other land-use interests conflict and compete for the limited space. The integrative power of geodata-driven technologies, GIS, in sharing mapped visual evidence at scale has been a crucial part of the cumulative awareness creation, science advocacy, and decision support the region has been enjoying over seven years. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, GIS has come in handy for effective visual communication with the benefits of i...

This module has been prepared to address the urgent need in Africa for modern, practice-oriented and locally relevant training of surveyors and engineers to be engaged actively in surveying and mapping related to mining and geosciences. The contents have mainly drawn on the author's experience in Kenya as a tunnel surveyor and university lecturer of engineering surveying, mining surveying, and GIS. The material shared here reinforces the contents of a similar chapter by the author in a modern book on Geomatics, which is hereby recommended as a reference book for further topics with details on executing modern surveying and geomatics engineering assignments. The book is Project Design for Geomatics Engineers and Surveyors, Second Edition (2023) by Clement Ogaja, Nashon Adero, and Derrick Koome.

Project Design for Geomatics Engineers and Surveyors, Second Edition, continues to focus on the key components and aspects of project design for geomatics and land surveying projects with the goal of helping readers navigate the priority issues when planning new projects. The second edition includes new materials on surveying and UAV, and it is thoroughly updated to keep current with the recent technology and terminology. The two new chapters capture new developments in the rapidly emerging use of remote sensing and GIS in aerial surveys, mapping, and imaging for small-to-medium scale projects, as well as modern practices and experiences in engineering surveying.

1. Provides a simple guide for geomatics engineering projects using recent and advanced technologies. 2. Includes new content on spatial data collection using GIS, drones, and 3D digital modeling. 3. Covers professional standards, professional and ethical responsibilities, and policy, social, and environmental issues related. 4. Discusses project planning including scheduling and budgeting. 5. Features practical examples with solutions and explains new methods for planning, implementing, and monitoring engineering and mining surveying projects.

Undergraduate and graduate students, professors, practicing professionals and surveyors will find this new edition useful, as well as geospatial/geomatics engineers, civil engineers, mining engineers, GIS professionals, planners, land developers, and project managers.

This was a winning idea under the inaugural ACCESS "University of Ideas" Competition for African lecturers.  Phase I of this project has been completed , which involved conducting a countrywide youth skills and employment survey to inform the development of a model for linking youth talents with skills development needs and labour market demographics. The stratified survey of more than 400 respondents found that only 29% of the respondents were in regular employment, and only 14% were flexibly engaged in the gig economy. Despite the majority having university degrees, the study found a low level of skills proficiency and digital fluency among them. The survey also found that a quarter of the respondents had not identified their talents before joining tertiary education levels, and the primary school level was identified as the weak link in talent management. The study recommends a competency- and skills-based curriculum for early talent identification and supports the development of a model for linking youth talents with skills development needs and labour market demographics.

Background African indigenous vegetables are important for food security and nutrition, and income of the poor farm households. In the era of COVID-19, they are critical for boosting people’s immunity. Unfortunately, both production of and trade in these vegetables is likely to be severely affected by the pandemic. Methods This study examined potential effects of COVID-19 pandemic on production and trade of African indigenous vegetables using a cross-sectional survey of 244 farmers and 246 traders from different regions in Kenya. Results COVID-19 has a negative impact on production and trading of AIVs in Kenya. Findings indicate that 75% of the farmers are experiencing declining production due to reduced access to input, farm labour and output market. Secondly, about 98% of the traders have recorded a drop in sales volumes due to containment measures implemented by the government and personal safety precautions. In particular, farmers’ production and traders’ sales volumes declined ...