Africa's need for a technological approach to monitor pollutions from mining activities

Africa hosts the largest mineral industry in the world and most of these mining countries operate with an unregulated environmental impact. The impact of mining operations touches on the principal elements of the environment affecting the implementation of the SDGs. Air quality is severely degraded by mining through putting a large quantity of dust into the atmosphere. This research seeks to analyze the impact of mining activities on the environment by considering three different mining sites from Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania by employing the services of the dataset from the NASA Giovanni System. We have used time series analysis of PM_2.5 from the NASA Giovanni System that spans the years before and during the mining activities at our study sites to determine the pollution levels and the health issues involved. The results obtained show that there was a significant increase in pollution level over time at all the mining sites. This work proposes an Internet of Things (IoT)-based solution to help the environmental protection agencies effectively monitor the pollution level from mining activities.