Kansanshi launches K200m community project

Kansanshi launches K200m community project
By David Chongo in Solwezi
Mon 03 May 2010, 22:40 CAT

KANSANSHI Mine has launched a K200 million poultry, irrigated vegetable and fish farming community empowerment project under parent company First Quantum Minerals Group’s corporate social responsibility programme.

Releasing details of the initiative in a statement to The Post in Solwezi, Kansanshi public relations manager Godfrey Msiska said the project was targeted at creating income generating activities for the surrounding Kyafukuma community near the mine.
He said the three-phase programme was aimed at not only creating employment for the local community but also enriching the environment and communities in which Kansanshi Mine operates.

Msiska said the projected amount in the exercise included the cost of rehabilitating old existing infrastructure, maintenance works, construction of new buildings, training and purchase of materials and livestock.

“Kansanshi will provide funding to meet the cost of rehabilitating the existing infrastructure such as the canals. The vegetable-farming project will entail the setting up of an irrigation system to tap water from one of the rivers in Kyafukuma, so that the community can grow vegetables all year round.

The budget on this project also covers training of the community in appropriate and sound training in fish farming, purchase of 11,000 fingerlings and start-up feeds… chicks, medicines, chicken feed, drinkers, feeders, doors, lamps and charcoal; all the inputs for vegetable growing which include fertilisers, seeds, pesticides and fungicides, spray pumps and other similar implements,” he said.

“A number of residents will be employed as brick layers, supervisors and labourers during construction of the irrigation system. Labour alone will gobble up K30m of the K84m earmarked for the irrigation project. These projects will not only create employment for the Kyafukuma community, but will also provide them with a source of sustainable income which should, in turn, spur them to create their own wealth.”

He hoped that the community in Kyafukuma would regenerate the investment and set up a revolving enterprise in capacity building and cater for some foodstuff needs of the province.

Beside the K84 million set for irrigated farming in the K200 million funding, K49 million would go into poultry farming and K67 million toward fish farming.

The project, in which Kansanshi is has received technical assistance from the district veterinary, fisheries and agricultural offices, follows the mine’s promotion of the jatropha out-grower programme in Kabwela and Mushitala and the bee keeping project in Mutanda.