The Simondou project is a mining and ore exploration project in Southeast Guinea, managed by the Rio Tinto Company. The mining camp is located between the cities of Dandano, Boola and Beyla. The surrounding communities are composed by many of the poorest people of the Republic of Guinea. There is lack of adequate sanitation and safe drinking water. The existing health system is weak and overwhelmed. Avid to explore the iron of the region, Rio Tinto received a mining concession of the region, while compromised to develop a 700km long haul iron ore railway and a Deep-water port. The project will demand 10 thousand direct jobs for the constructions and 4.500 full-time jobs after …show more content…
Explain the IFC HIA toolkit for community health and safety as applied to the project.
It is a methodology to put in place the set of guidance notes and standards of IFC into the project’s HIA framework. Such standards recognize that the project activities could increase community exposure to impacts. Therefore is the project-owner duty to minimize or avoid such risks (IFC 2007).
Among the IFC HIA tools are: the population stratification into potentially affected communities (PACs), the environmental health area (EHA) framework and risk analysis matrix.
Through analysis of project documents, regional and local statistics of health, as well as stakeholder feedbacks and interviews, it was possible to form a comprehensive baseline health, demographic and socioeconomic profile of the potentially affected communities.
Regarding EHA, the IFC HIA toolkit recommends 12 EHAs to be accounted on the analysis (IFC, 2009). The HIA identified the 12 environmental health areas predisposed to capture the connections between community impacts and project-related activities.
After obtaining the above mentioned PACs baseline data, it was possible to perform a risk analysis of each health outcome and determinant, linking it to each EHA. The author summarized such information on the Table …show more content…
Due to such lack of baseline health data, it was required by the HIA to review the grey literature and related socioeconomic baseline studies, as well as health statistics from local facilities. It was also set a set of interview guides for key informant interviews formed by stakeholders of the project. Additionally, field visits allowed collect direct observations data. Through the three mentioned forms of data collection is possible to determine the incidence and significance of health outcomes. After analysis of all gathered baseline health data, it was required to correlate them, checking one against other. Then they were classified regarding its frequency and importance (as absent, rare/insignificant, occasional/minor importance and frequent/major