No Update For West Africa20 Apr 2020 20:20
It would be really disappointing for Centamin to ignore West Africa at this time. Gold mining companies are one of the few bright spots in their economic future. And given the challenges regarding COVID19 we and other miners can be of enormous benefit in supplying income thru employment, securing essential supplies and infrastructure development.
Here's an interesting glimpse into the hardship Burkina Faso currently faces - like so many other African nations.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/burkina-faso/
The county’s minister of mines, Oumarou Idani, also tested positive after returning from the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2020 convention in Toronto. In all, four Burkinabe government ministers have tested positive for COVID-19....
Armand tells me he has been attending the COVID-19 crisis committee press conferences, interviewed the prime minister, and been protecting himself by wearing a mask and gloves and keeping away from his family, with whom he communicates by phone.
He says the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle the pandemic:
Today our healthcare infrastructure hardly functions. Healthcare workers are poorly equipped and protected, and we have the problem of hospitals that are also poorly equipped.
For the entire city of Ouagadougou, with a population of 2.2. million, he says there is only one centre, at the Tengandogo Hospital, for quarantining anyone ill with COVID-19.
People are very worried because they have no guarantee of adequate healthcare. And with the quarantining in the country’s large cities to prevent COVID-19, people are living in a constant state of suffering because most of them live hand-to-mouth, surviving by petty trading or subsistence farming.
Food in the large cities — vegetables, fruit, meat and fish — comes from villages around them, and with the order that places the cities into quarantine (except for the transport of goods) and from what I have seen myself, the people who normally would come from the villages to supply the city with food can no longer do so, as they don’t have access to the large trucks that transport goods. As a result, there is dramatic inflation of food prices in the cities.
The closure of shops and small markets, where the majority of poor people shop because prices are lower, is a huge catastrophe for merchants because once their stores close, they have no income, and they have to let their workers go because they can’t pay them, so people don’t have money for food.
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