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By Tijana Mitrovic - 20 May 2025
Meet Ben Scott: A Canadian Young Mining Leader Award-winner making an impact on the industry
Despite growing up with an exploration geologist as a father, Ben Scott did not plan to follow a similar career path. “I’ve always been very passionate about soils but decided I wanted to do something a bit different and go into civil [engineering],” he said. “It's quite ironic how I've ended up right back in the mining industry.”
After completing his Bachelor of Applied Science in civil engineering at Queen’s University in 2012, Scott worked in construction and oil and gas mining. This included work on the Mildred Lake mine replacement project, where he learned the elements of construction infrastructure. Scott found the fly-in-fly-out aspect of the role very attractive, ultimately leading him to join B2Gold in 2015.
During Scott’s first two years at B2Gold as a civil engineer, he worked in Mali on sites such as tailings facilities, water dams, road construction, and camp facilities, specifically around the company’s Fekola gold mine. In 2017, Scott began working as a project manager on the Fadougou village relocation project, which he says was a “really rewarding experience.” The project involved relocating a village of over 3,200 people to a new village location. The company developed on a 110-hectare site, building 28 kilometres of roads, a water distribution system, public lighting and over 730 structures, including a market and several other community facilities.
“During that process, I started to get very involved in the social dynamics of the site and the social license of our site,” Scott said. “It was something I was quite passionate about, especially as we started to get into the design of the community and how we were going to build it. Probably the most rewarding experience I've had in my career is that we built the new community with the community itself.”
Scott and his team created a training course for people from the region, training them on how to be bricklayers, masons, roofers, welders and more, and used it to identify individuals who could potentially help build the new village. “During that process, we employed about 350 people from the local communities,” he said. “By the time we got to the end of construction, we started to put them through an entrepreneurship course so that they could start their own businesses. Now we've set up individual contractors who could continue the construction quality standard. They built the community, and they know how to maintain it.”
In 2019, Scott joined B2Gold’s corporate office, where he has helped support B2Gold’s operations through feasibility studies, long-term strategic planning and the company’s tailings management procedures.
Scott is currently the operations manager for the Goose gold project at B2Gold’s Back River site in Nunavut and is member on of the Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement Steering Committee for implementation at the site. “[We’re working] to set up how we will have relationships with our local community,” he said. “As much as we're in a completely opposite part of the world, it's very much the same type of conditions that dictate the success of your project.” He noted that relationship building with local stakeholders and communities is integral to the success of mine operations.
While Scott always looks forward to putting his hand up to work on new project developments in remote areas, he is currently focused on the Goose project. “We're just in the stage of wrapping up construction, and we’re targeting to produce our first gold [at] the end of June,” he explained. “That's what I'm very excited [about], to get this mine from the development phase into the operational phase and be a part of that.”
