Zimbabwe School Of Mines To Venture Into Jewellery Making
The Zimbabwe School of Mines (ZSM) in Bulawayo has launched an ambitious project to expand its Gemstone and Lapidary Workshop into jewellery making.
This initiative aims to empower students and local artisans with advanced skills to design and craft high-quality jewellery, utilizing Zimbabwe’s abundant gemstone resources.
In April, the Mineral Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) demonstrated its commitment to social responsibility by donating equipment valued at US$1.1 million for cutting and polishing gemstones to the school.
During a recent tour of the Gemstone and Lapidary Workshop by Bulawayo’s Minister of State for Provincial Affairs and Devolution, Judith Ncube, ZSM Principal Edwin Gwaze announced that the course design for jewellery making has been finalized.
The school is now focused on acquiring the necessary equipment to facilitate the production of jewellery items such as rings, necklaces, and bracelets, among others. Said Gwaze (via The Sunday News):
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In the current setup, the students that we are training are taken through an incubation programme.
This programme is meant to equip these students with the skills to be able to start their own cutting and polishing factories.
This group has finished their final examination and we are now starting the incubation programme which is going to run for six months.
He added:
We used to have jewellery shops here in Bulawayo so let’s put our heads together, gather resources and make sure we empower young people to value- add and beneficiate raw minerals.
Let’s have equipment for the institution so that when students graduate they would have gone through all the processes.
The major focus was the gemstone sector where we have come up with courses in Gemology and also Gemstone Cutting and Polishing, so the Lapidary Workshop is a perfect fit into Vision 2030 because we are now creating skills that can beneficiate our gemstones.
In the past, we all know that gemstones were being sold in rough form and as a nation, we were losing millions of dollars because we were not value-adding our stones.
When you sell a rough gemstone you are losing more than 10 times what you could get if you were to value-add that stone, so I think this is a welcome development to the nation and the region.
Zimbabwe has implemented a range of policies aimed at promoting mineral beneficiation and value addition within the country.
A key initiative has been the introduction of restrictions on the export of unprocessed minerals.
The rationale behind this policy is to stimulate the development of Zimbabwe’s domestic mineral processing capabilities, create employment opportunities, and generate higher-value exports.
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