The Mozambique government has awarded a contract to Canada-based Spatial Dimension to expand the cadastre system of the Ministry of Mineral Resources.
The expansion will involve the incorporation into the cadastre system of Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative compliance monitoring and reporting, as well as, for diamonds, the same functions for the Kimberley Process. It will also expand the geographic coverage of the cadastre system to encompass four new regional offices. The programme is being funded by the World Bank thought its Extractive Industries Technical Advisory Facility.
This contract is effectively a follow-up to a 2003 contract, also funded by the World Bank, to create a modern cadastre system for the African country. “This [new] contract, coming almost exactly ten years to the day that Spatial Dimension was first contracted by the Mozambican Ministry of Mineral Resources to implement a new computerised mining cadastre system, is particularly special for all of us at Spatial Dimension,” said company CEO Bill Feast.
“By adopting our FlexiCadastre solution, Mozambique has been able to stay current with technology changes over the past decade through our software maintenance programme,” he affirmed. “This is a key differentiator of Spatial Dimension’s value proposition in the industry, we deliver sustainable solutions that are easy to support, maintain and extend as needs and technology change.”
Spatial Dimension was actually founded in Cape Town, in 1999, but now has its head office in Vancouver. It has subsidiary companies in Canada, South Africa, Australia and Brazil, with offices in Vancouver, Cape Town, Pretoria, Perth, Sydney and Belo Horizonte. It can provide support to its customers in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
The company launched its FlexiCadastre product in 2003, and Mozambique was its first customer for the system. FlexiCadastre is now the world’s most widely employed mining cadastre system, used by more than 1 200 public- and private-sector clients. The only continent on which the system is not used is Antarctica.
In Africa, since that original contract for Mozambique, the company has established or modernised mining cadastre systems in Côte d’Ivoire (2012), the Democratic Republic of Congo (2007), Ethiopia (2008), Kenya (2011), Liberia (2009), Rwanda (2013), Senegal (2009), Tanzania (2005), Uganda (2011) and Zambia (2012 or 2013). Private-sector clients – specifically for their African operations – include AngloGold Ashanti (2009), Anglo Platinum (2010), ENRC (2013) and Rio Tinto (2012). (In all cases the years in brackets indicate when the contracts were awarded. The date of the Zambian contract is not clear.)