Women ought to break down barriers in mining
Pauline Dikuelo | Friday September 22, 2017 15:47
Out of the 6,900 Debswana employees, about 98% are locals. From this, about 20% are women. According to different speakers at the Women In Mining conference held recently, this number could improve if women considered alternatives to white-collar jobs, which are mostly based in towns and cities.
For decades their male counterparts have dominated the enrolment of engineers in universities, which resulted in the current dominance in the industry. Experts believe that one of the challenges is that women tend to expect preferential treatment while working at industries like mining unlike their male counterparts instead of working hard and proving that they belong.
Even when doing business careers, they say most women opt for placement in city centres even when it comes to supply of goods and services, which can also be done in mining.
According to the Minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs, Edwin Batshu women can also penetrate the mining industry as businesswomen using available schemes by the government. He urged women to embrace the schemes availed by government like the Gender Affairs Scheme, Economic Diversification Drive (EDD) to venture into industries like mining even through preferential treatment of local manufacturers and supply of goods and services.
“There is one which indicates that Botswana Chamber of Mines working with the Ministry of Investment Trade and Industry (MITI) has an arrangement, which accords the Botswana Chamber of Mines an opportunity to use the mining industry’s purchasing power to catapult the economy’s diversification plan having observed that women are less involved in the mining sector. This is another viable route in which they can assert their participation in the mining industry,” he says.
He notes that government continues to monitor the environment where businesswomen operate and develop measures to address and identify other gaps that hinder empowering citizens and as such employ all critical stakeholders and key players in the various economic sectors to join efforts to realise sustainable economic development.
Sharing her experience at the conference, Prisca Tembo, the co-founder of Namemco Energy, which currently employs about 24 people with three being women, says joining the mining industry just like any other business was not an easy road. She explains that when establishing her company, she did not have any financial backup.
“When we started in 2012, all financial institutions turned us down because we were a start-up company and had no financial backup. We then decided to sell gravel from the mine, which earned us a bit of money that helped us secure a loan from the National Development Bank (NDB) even though the money was not enough,” she reveals. According to Tembo, they had to source the cheapest machinery, and continued taking advantage of the available opportunities that existed at the mine like transporting and selling gravel until 2015 when they started crushing, something they are still doing now.
“The good thing about minerals is that you can sell everything, even soil. When crushing, there are many opportunities that can come out like transportation of materials from the quarry to customers,” she says.
She explains that most women fear the machinery used in the mines even the trucks and they are not bold enough to show that they belong in the same field as men.
One of the few female industry-players in the country, Ndibo Matshameko, who currently works as a mine geologist at Debswana Jwaneng Mine says she was grateful because after graduating from the University of Botswana in 2002 she got a job as an exploration geologist.
Later on she augmented her technical skills and did a Master of Science in Strategic Management as well as Enterprise Risk Management from Botswana Accountancy College (BAC). According to Matshameko, women need to stop choosing their careers based on appearances rather than consider the outcomes. She advised that the mining industry just like any other can be penetrated by females noting that they have the capability as they are used to multi-tasking.
“There are two different sides to me, when I go to work I forget that I am a female and start performing equal to my male counterparts, but when I knock of, I become a glamorous mother, a wife, a sister, a friend,” she says.