ABSTRACT
Natural resources development is the biggest asset for rapid and sustainable development of a country. However, information on natural resources available in Africa is much less than in other continents in the world. This and the lack of sufficient funds for geological mapping are affecting Africa’s ability to maximize its potential of resources use. Therefore, in most African countries, there is the need to provide transparent public geological information. In recent times, such information is acquired by exploration of precious minerals such as gold, diamond and silver. However, such explorations are not carried out at all or not to an equal degree for Development Minerals or industrial minerals like construction material, dimension stones, and semi-precious stones. Development Minerals, especially those extensively used as bulk construction materials e.g. sand and quarry stones, stimulate the rapid transformation of cities and of many metropolitan and urban areas in developing countries. The phenomenal growth recently in infrastructure such as housing, office complexes and road construction have all benefited from extensive exploitation of such materials, which are transported and used in the construction and allied industries from mainly peri-urban and rural communities. Exploitation of these materials provides employment, livelihoods, and income to many low-income households and women, in particular. In spite of their increasingly socio-economic importance, however, not much research has been done to systematically map and document the spatial distribution of such materials to know their likely effect over time on the physical landscape or on the health and safety of people directly engaged in mining and on communities that are close to these mining sites.
This project seeks to identify Development Minerals that are extracted in some parts of Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, by localizing the mining sites of these minerals and representing them in a map using a Geographic Information System (GIS), and observing and identifying the impact of the extraction on the affected people. This approach provides relevant data for policy planning and implementation, such as maximizing the benefits derived from the exploitation and use of Development Minerals in the metropolitan areas in Ghana as well as assessing the possible negative impacts of such exploitations and updating Ghana’s geoscientific data.
