KoBold Metals (KoBold) has identified the digitization of historic mining archives as one of the many levers for unlocking additional investment in Zambia’s mining.
KoBold president Josh Goldman told President Hichilema at a meeting on 7 June at State House to present progress, findings, and other pertinent matters regarding KoBold’s investment and prospects in Zambia that KoBold, working with ZCCM-IH, had already converted thousands of pages of documents into digital formats.
“Our itinerary is the digitization of historical data, and our involvement here started two years ago. Elsewhere in the world, historic data inventory is incredibly important to us,” disclosed Goldman.
He said KoBold hired dedicated staff, a combination of people with backgrounds in Information Technology and geoscience, to begin working with ZCCM-IH. Together, they started digitizing the records in Kalulushi and building a digital archive. So far, they are 40% into the project, with over 100,000 pages crossed over into digital form.
“We have now hired three more people who are staffing our digital archive project here in Lusaka at the Geological Survey Department and these projects are going very, very well,” he disclosed.
Goldman stressed that this was for Zambia, not KoBold and that the goal is to stimulate more exploration investment, not just by KoBold but by many explorers and the willingness to risk capital.
“Our aim here is this is not for KoBold, this is for Zambia and part of the discussion from the beginning in each of these projects is our assistance to make this data public is that everyone learns,” he said. “The goal is to stimulate more exploration investment not just by KoBold, but by a lot of explorers and the willingness to risk capital and to fail and to pick up where one person leaves off and fail again and where that person leaves off and try again. There’s a greater incentive to do so when you don’t have to redo what someone else did 50 years ago. We can learn from that and try the next thing.”
Goldman, who has been involved in collecting geoscientific data and using it to make discoveries all over the world throughout his career, described it as a fundamental building block to the successful discovery and, therefore, the attraction of investment to Zambia.
“When we visited the site in Kalulushi, I was just incredibly impressed by the Zambian staff who are doing this really difficult, very tedious work of digitizing, collecting, and scanning of all this information, maps, and reports into this digital format.”
He says the people doing this job understand the relationship between data and knowledge, calling it foundational and that it would pay dividends.
“There’s a fundamental relationship between the quality of the geoscientific data and the amount of investment that people are willing to spend on mineral exploration in those jurisdictions, all other things being equal,” explained Goldman.
He said when the fundamentals, including an acceptable legal framework, are in place, geoscientific data “is then the piece that makes a difference that allows you to come and make that initial decision of what might identify those areas that have potential and then come and do mineral exploration, so it’s a hugely important piece.”
In response, President Hichilema observed that there may be room for the government to ride on KoBold’s expertise, knowledge, and technology in the mapping exploration exercise it had embarked on.
“We’d like, minister [of Mines], to have convergence. We are looking at a mapping project, I think it’s only important that we have a rationalization together with what Mingomba is doing, given the technology that they’ve already used and applied successfully to be able to do a job that ordinarily in the mining heritage would have taken five years to do,” said Mr. Hichilema.
“So, we’d like to piggyback on that because we are about to contract if we have not already contracted but we can still rationalize. Let’s stitch this story together so we can be rational, we can be prudent, we don’t spend money on something that is already done elsewhere,” he advised.
