The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | New Zealand-based software house; Seequent, has unveiled a Geoscience data portal, that aims to improve the geoscience understanding of Jinja and Mbarara district in Eastern and Western Uganda. The portal makes geoscience data freely available to encourage investment.
The primary aim is to encourage mineral exploration and support better early-stage decision making. At the same time, the data resources will benefit environmental and land-use planning, water resource management and sustainable energy development such as geothermal.
The project is a collaborative initiative between the African Union Commission, Geosoft Inc. (a Seequent company), the British Geological Survey (BGS), the Uganda Directorate of Geological Survey and Mines (UDGSM) and the Ugandan Chamber of Mines and Petroleum (UCMP). The portal is cloud-hosted by The National Information and Technology Authority – Uganda (NITA-U).
The portal will focus on Jinja within the greenstone belt to the east of Kampala, prospective for gold, base metals, phosphates, rare earth elements and vermiculite; and Mbarara southwest of Kampala which has the potential for gold and base metals including copper, lead, nickel and zinc.
The portal has a powerful user-friendly interface for delivering multi-disciplinary data and documents stored within multiple systems. Stakeholders can define their area of interest to search for data, interrogate, preview and download data in commercial or open standard formats via a shareable link.
The data can easily be integrated into exploration company prospectively analysis, exploration software packages and other decision support packages used by potential investors.
“Activation of Africa’s vast geodata resources, through multi-stakeholder collaboration, is key to unlocking its value for downstream economic and social benefit within the respective countries. We are excited along with our project partners to explore how geoscience data can enable this,” June McAlarey an official from Seequent, said in a press release today.
Patrick Bell, the Information Systems Team Leader at the British Geological Survey says that the portal is a great opportunity to test a model whereby resources data are integrated with environmental data in a developing area.
“Having such a wide spectrum of geoscience data available will provide an opportunity to examine how its usage can support broader applications including environmental, infrastructure, and water management.”
Zachary Baguma, the Commissioner Geology at the Uganda Directorate of Geological Survey and Mines says that the project is in tandem with Uganda’s investment promotion efforts, following the launch of a country-wide exploration and data collection campaign.
Baguma adds that this will be one of the means of exposing Uganda’s data globally and attracting direct foreign investment.
Catherine Niwamanya Wabomba, the acting Chief Executive Officer at the Ugandan Chamber of Mines and Petroleum says that the three-year project will fill one of the biggest gaps Uganda is currently faced with; availability of data.
“We are excited to be part of a partnership to showcase and make available data that would guide potential investors into Uganda’s mineral sector.”
The pilot project is guided by the aspirations and principles of the Africa Mining Vision (AMV) and Agenda 2063, which recognizes geodata as an imperative for the future development of Africa’s extractives, energy, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, infrastructure, and tourism sectors.
Support for the Ugandan portal project was also provided by the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), which provided advisory services and research and development funding to Geosoft Inc., which is based in Toronto.
The pilot project, part of the African Resource Geoscience Initiative (ARGI), was enabled through a public-private-partnership between the government of Uganda as well as industry and commercial organizations under the auspices of the African Union Commission (AUC). It will formally be launched at the 8th annual Mineral Wealth Conference (MWC), in Kampala, today.
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