Cadres de pratique et développement des compétences d’employabilité durable : Cas de communautés de pratique d’orpailleurs à Bétaré-Oya (Est-Cameroun)

Abstract

The employability of people’s is highly targeted in the world today. In a context marked by high mutations where jobs and the environment are changing, it is important to make this employability sustainable. Education is necessary to achieve this type of employability. For specific professionals like artisanal miners, whose employment depends on the environment, education must promote the development of sustainable employability skills. Indeed, in many countries like Cameroon, thousands of gold miners use mercury to collect gold; a very toxic and environmentally destructive substance. Educational activities are often carried out among artisanal miners to remedy this situation. But many of them still do not change the way they work, despite being informed that the use of mercury is dangerous. Why does the professional behavior of gold miners not change? The main question of developing sustainable employability skills for gold miners guided us during this research. We then propose to question what has already been done. We believe that the current professional training system for gold miners is not effective and that it needs to be improved. It is with a fine crest that we proceed to evaluate this device. To obtain results close to reality, we carry out qualitative research which is intended to be exploratory. In this approach, a case study of two communities of practice of gold miners was carried out in Bétaré-Oya in the Eastern region of Cameroon. We combined two tools to collect data : observation of practice settings and interviews with gold miners and gold miner supervisors. We relied on our theoretical framework consisting of the theory of situated learning and socio-ecological model of behavior change and on also the concept of professional skills development to operationalize our research. We thus obtained that in communities of practice of gold miners, the fundamental elements of situated learning (the context or access, participation and collaboration) and the dimensions of professional competence (knowing how to act, wanting to act and being able to act) are insufficiently. In particular, they lack technical know-how without mercury, the ability to resist the bad influences of others and an encouraging environment to no longer use mercury. So it will not be enough for gold miners to learn an artisanal gold extraction technique without mercury for them to be able to abandon this toxic substance. Despite some limits in this thesis, we seem to have obtained usable information to improve the professional training system for gold miners and guide the design of effective educational interventions that can lead to the development of sustainable employability skills of artisan miners.