Elaine Hattingh, Exxaro Resources. Photo: Karolina Komendera

Several months ago, I attended the annual Investing in Africa Mining Indaba in Cape Town and the insights painted a pretty dismal picture. Combine a lack of reliable energy with a dearth of technical skills, massive increases in demand, a dramatic rise in illegal mining and major supply-chain bottlenecks and what you have is an industry that is struggling to stay above water, let alone capitalise on the opportunities as the world looks to a more sustainable future. As Albert Einstein once said, you can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them; you have to approach them from a different perspective.

This is exactly what some of the industry’s biggest firms are doing. Lithakazi Nxiweni, an innovation consultant at the Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS), says there are many examples that show how industry is embracing new technologies and innovation to transform the work they do. For example, some of the most significant investments include expanding the mine’s digital infrastructure to enable things like predictive maintenance and smart stock management and deploying real-time information systems so that data can be collected and transferred between underground and surface operations. Mines are also looking at technology to aid their decarbonisation efforts, to streamline processes and identify gaps in mining cycles, as well as improve mining practices and procedures and boost safety and security. According to Nxiweni, cybersecurity has become a major focus in recent years as more mines adopt digital processes and are starting to realise that this wider digital footprint increases the risk of a cyber attack.