UAV-mounted geo-magnetic mapping for supporting responsible ASGM land-use

Innovation Description

We intend to empower, and capacitate government and private sector partners, in West Africa - including groups of artisanal miners, to utilize UAV-based geo-magnetic survey, as a core tool for helping ASGM stakeholders map new gold prospects efficiently and safely, while vastly improving land management (i.e. the planning and administration of new areas being allocated to artisanal mining).

Team

Daniel Stapper, Manager, Pact Mines to Markets - Canada

Peter Deuck, Chief Business Officer and Principal Geophysicist at Axiom - Canada

Christopher Toews, Global Logistics, Humanitarian Specialist, Philanthropic Advisor - USA

Abderahmane Khalifa, CEO Magma International - Mauritania

Reason for Applying

“We believe this UAV innovation for geo-prospecting holds great promise as a leap-frog technology, and we believe investments should be made to pilot how these benefits can be shared with ASGM miners. Industrial miners (especially geological exploration companies) are already benefiting enormously from this technology. We believe this technology can be used to support early-phase exploration in vast areas that government agencies agree can be explored for new deposits. The technology will reveal critical preliminary target zones for ASGM miners to explore in an organized and supported manner (with oversight from government), using their traditional shovel-in-the-ground methods. Using UAVs for this preliminary target seeking activity is vastly cheaper than previously possible using previous remote sensing and ground magnetic survey methods.”