THE National Environment Management Council (NEMC) is constructing a building in Geita Region that will be used to educate the public about the impact of mercury use in gold mining.

The building is expected to be completed in July next year and is expected to cost $1.5 million.

Eng. Betrina Igulu, NEMC mercury control project manager unveiled this in Dar es Salaam yesterday when speaking to reporters about the development of the project.

She said the mercury use supervision project is being implemented by the government with funding from the World Bank (WB) in the seven regions of Mwanza, Mara Geita, Singida, Mbeya, Songwe, and Shinyanga.

She said the project aims to reduce and if possible completely eliminate the use of mercury by small miners because it is a chemical that the World Health Organization (WHO) has said is one of the 10 chemicals that have an impact on human health.

She said that in Tanzania, the mining sector is one of the biggest sectors involving many people, so NEMC has decided to invest more in the community so that it can learn about the safe use of mercury, the use of alternative technologies, and how to protect yourself from getting sick while panning for gold.

"Through this project, we have decided to build a building to provide education to the public in Geita and now we have decided to ensure that the construction of our building complies with the Environmental Law of 2004 to begin with we have done an environmental impact assessment and we are grateful that it has been done and completed on time," she said.

“We are in charge of making sure that all investors do an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), so by doing that we have set an example for others that even we have to obey the law we are in charge of,” she said.

In addition, she said (EIA) was managed by NEMC experts in cooperation with experts and added that once built they will ensure the building has an enabling infrastructure that is environmentally friendly and for the lake region it will be a model building. 

Lilian Lukambuzi, NEMC director of Environmental Impact Assessment said that they have already handed over an environmental impact assessment certificate to build a project centre to control the use of mercury after fulfilling the conditions made by NEMC.

 "In implementing EIA we have complied with the environmental law of 2004 that requires all projects that are built to do EIA," she said

 She said NEMC has decided to carry out an EIA on the environment and society to ensure the sustainability of the project to control the use of mercury in the lake region.

 “I would like to use this opportunity to appeal to government institutions to ensure that they comply with the law that requires them to carry out an EIA before starting the implementation of projects to keep the environment in a sustainable state,” she said.