A mining engineering graduate from the University of Namibia says more young people should study the field to have a greater impact on the local sector.
Juliet Haingura's honours research has been implemented at the Swakop Uranium Mine.
Haingura researched sustainable mining practices and wanted to see their impact on the mine's contractor company.
"There's something called powder factor, which is basically how many explosives are used to blast the ground where we extract the ore from, the uranium from. Increasing the powder factor raises costs because it requires using more explosives. Increasing that while keeping the rate at which you're paying the contractor the same is infeasible because explosives and the entire process are expensive. I was trying to figure out exactly how much the change was and the effect that it had on the contractor, basically. How much money were they going to spend on doing that?" she said.
Haingura's framework was an outline of how to calculate the change.
"It was just a simplified version for them to input, even with the new data that they're getting that might be confidential to me. They can input it into this framework and then get the results."
She is proud to have her research incorporated into mining operations.
"As a student, you feel like there is not much you can contribute to your field. Whenever you can make a small contribution and people acknowledge your work, it feels very reassuring. While I was doing my internship, my supervisor actually worked there. He is an engineer at that company, and he provided me with the idea because it addressed a dilemma they were currently facing."
Haingura is calling for more platforms that encourage science, technology, engineering and maths education.
"I feel like we hear about STEM a lot, but it's not encouraged enough. There's so much more that we can get out of it. There are so many young minds that aren't being pushed enough or aren't being funded enough. I firmly believe that individuals of my age and generation possess significant contributions, often overlooked due to our youth. I'd like to encourage people to study mining engineering. I feel like it's not as popular as the other engineering disciplines, but there's so much in mining, so go study mining."