This is the 110th article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“Learning about yourself and what you want to do is really valuable, and you’re always going to develop yourself, even if you take a wrong turn,” Eduard Cornew ’14 said. Cornew is the co-founder and president of Mwamba, a gold mining company that strives to eliminate the use of mercury for small-scale mining operations and provide them with feasible alternatives.
Cornew moved to Portola Valley from Mexico City when he was three years old. “In many ways, I never noticed a large difference. In California, I enjoyed a diverse community and continued to cultivate my Hispanic roots,” he said. “I enjoyed the freedom of growing up in Silicon Valley—biking around town and exploring the Valley with my friends. A gated home was replaced by a tight-knit community.”
At M-A, Cornew played lacrosse and football. “Football and lacrosse were really fun. I found good mentors and role models in the football coach and in [Steven] Kryger at the lacrosse team,” he said. “It was a great way to meet new friends and expand my network.”
Cornew also expressed gratitude to his AP English teachers, Liane Strub and Lisa Otsuka. “I want to shout out Strub—to this day, [she is] one of my fondest memories of a teacher really engaging you as an equal,” he said. “Otsuka was so amazing, pumping everybody full of optimism and joy.”
After graduating, Cornew attended Dartmouth College, where he double-majored in economics and psychology and minored in human-centered design and architecture. “I enjoyed the utility of math, but I appreciated it in the context of critical thinking and software analysis,” he said. “Economics was a fun way to pick from all the different things I enjoyed at M-A across those different quantitative and qualitative classes I had.”
At Dartmouth, Cornew ran an on-campus business called Lone Pine Repairs with his twin brother, where they fixed Apple products. “Thomas, my twin brother, started doing it when he was 12-years-old. Around Portola Valley and Menlo Park, he was known as the ‘iPhone kid’,” he said.
At the start of their senior year, Cornew and his brother were approached by their classmate Samwel Bahebe with the idea of exporting gold. Bahebe grew up in Tanzania and was familiar with the troubles faced by small-scale gold miners, as they relied on a dangerous method of manually crushing rocks and using mercury to extract the gold. Seeing these struggles firsthand motivated Bahebe to find a way to reduce mercury use in gold mining.
“At [Dartmouth’s] economics department, I met the first angel investor for my company in Bruce Sacerdote, who was doing my senior seminar,” Cornew said. “After I visited my Tanzanian co-founder, Sam, in Tanzania, Bruce said, ‘This is really interesting—you should pursue it,’ and helped us get the business off the ground.”
“Bruce said he would invest if we were able to figure out how to export gold as sort of a pressure test,” Cornew added.
Over the course of the year, with the help of Sacerdote, the group worked through licensing and incorporation to determine whether they could get gold to Dartmouth by graduation. “We got it there just in the nick of time. Sam’s brother flew to graduation with a piece of gold,” Cornew said.
In 2018, Cornew launched Mwamba, a Tanzania-based gold mining company that partners with gold miners to provide them with technologies and equipment so that they can maximize profits while replacing dangerous mercury processing methods. “We give safe processing to small-scale miners in developing countries. Something like 20% of the global gold supply is made by 45 million miners around the world that are essentially subsistence miners,” Cornew explained.
“[Tanzanians are] sitting on this huge opportunity, these mineral resources with the potential to fund their well-being, income, education, and lift these communities out of poverty,” Cornew said. “Seeing that felt like a compelling thing to devote myself to. I fell in love with the people and the potential for impact and meaning.”
Cornew’s industry gained global recognition after the United Nations adopted the Minamata Convention in 2013—an international treaty focused on protecting human health and the environment from the impacts of mercury.
As a part of this global effort, the United Nations established planetGOLD, a program designed to make small-scale mining safer. Since 2020, Cornew has advised the program on policy, shared the best practices for implementation, and helped shape its agenda. “planetGOLD has been massively valuable in all the information we got, and then rewarding in being able to advocate for our own beliefs, and thinking how to help small-scale miners,” he said.
Currently, Cornew serves as Mwamba’s president and chief financial officer. “My brother and I knew we wanted to do entrepreneurship, so we found this opportunity where you’re looking at the most rural, marginalized, and impoverished people in a developing country like Tanzania,” he said.
“I’m really grateful to M-A and all the outstanding faculty and staff, because that was the time in my life when I had all these brilliant people invest in me and set me up for what’s been the rest of the last 10 years,” Cornew said.
Cornew’s advice to current M-A students: “I would advise others to follow their passion and try lots of different things. Trust the process—there’s value in every opportunity.”
To those interested in economics: “Engage in reading current events, and then these concepts, which on a textbook page can seem pretty flat, become tools for real-world understanding. You’ll find more joy in it as a pursuit if you take that real-world lens and apply it to what you’re learning.”
