B2Gold Corp. (BTO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold, and it's my pleasure to welcome you and to call to order the 2022 Annual General and Special Meeting of the shareholders of B2Gold. As a result of heightened health and safety concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also hosting the meeting through a virtual platform, accessible to all our shareholders who have followed the procedures described in the information circular to participate, submit questions and vote regardless of physical location. I will act as chair of this meeting and appoint Roger Richer, on my left, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the company, to act as recording secretary of this meeting; and Anita Basi of Computershare Investor Services Inc. to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are my fellow directors, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, George Johnson, Robin Weisman and Liane Kelly. The other officers of the company with us today are Roger Richer, who I mentioned; Mike Cinnamond, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer, on my right; Tom Garagan, in the middle on the left, Senior Vice President of Exploration; and Dennis Stansbury, on his left, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Project Evaluations; and Bill Lytle, on the floor on my right, Senior Vice President of Operations and Chief Operating Officer; Randall Chatwin, who is Senior Vice President, Legal and Corporate Communications; Dale Craig, Vice President of Operations and Country Manager of Gramalote Colombia Limited; Ed Bartz, Vice President of Taxation and External Reporting; Vic King, recently promoted to the position of Vice President of Exploration; Brian Scott, Vice President, Geology and Technical Services; John Rajala, Vice President of Metallurgy; Neil Reeder, Vice President of Government Relations; Dana Rogers, Vice President of Finance; and Peter Montano, recently promoted to Vice President of Projects. Notice of this meeting and the accompanying information circular was filed and the notice and access notification and proxy form or voting instructions form was mailed to the shareholders on May 16, 2022. I received a copy of the declaration attesting to the publication and mailing, and the recording secretary will arrange for the declaration to be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder. I propose that we waive reading the notice of meeting, unless anyone specifically requests that it be read at this time. The recording secretary has notified me that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting properly constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. I propose that we deal first with all of the routine business requirements and then terminate the formal meeting and carry on in a less formal manner by way of an opportunity for questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders about the company's activities and operations. As this meeting is being held in person and virtually, I would like to set a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. For those attending online, questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the messaging icon at the top of the virtual interface. When reading out a question, I will note the name of the registered shareholder or proxy holder submitting the question. In order to deal with all questions in a timely fashion, questions of a similar nature will be answered once and duplicate questions will not receive a response. For those attending in person, only registered shareholders or proxy holders may ask questions or vote. Before addressing the Chair, identify yourself by name and show the card provided to you upon registration. Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled. It would be appreciated, however, if questions and comments of a general nature were deferred until the question period. If we are unable to address your general question during that time, a representative of B2Gold will reach out to you following the meeting with a response. Voting on all matters of this meeting will be conducted by ballot. For those attending online, to allow sufficient time for voting the polls for all matters being voted on will be open following these introductory remarks and closed at the end of the meeting. Momentarily, you will see the ballot open on the virtual interface requesting you to start registering your votes. I remind you that only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have properly lodged in -- sorry, logged in with their control numbers or user name will be able to see on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting and will be asked to vote on each business item. To vote, simply click on your choice, for or withhold or against, as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply change your selection. When the poll closes, the votes submitted on each resolution item will be recorded through the virtual meeting platform. For those attending in person, I understand that each registered shareholder and proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting received a ballot at the time of registration. Registered shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should mark an x or other mark in the square associated with the word for, withhold or against as applicable and sign the ballot. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. I remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you have already voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again. For any motions duly brought before the meeting not included in the circular, the polls for such matters will be opened and closed as I deem necessary or desirable for the orderly and expeditious conduct of the meeting. If you plan to vote at the meeting, you may choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait to cast your vote until after an item is discussed. Once discussion on all items of business before the meeting is concluded, I will give registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders one final opportunity to enter their votes on the open polls if they haven't already done so and then declare voting closed on all resolutions. Voting totals in favor or against or withheld, as the case may be, for each resolution item will be tallied once the voting is completed. Once the polls have closed, I will report on the outcome of the motions. The final results of the polls will be reported in the scrutineer's support and will be posted on our SEDAR profile. I now declare the polls open on all resolutions, including the circular. The first time of business is the presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2021 and the auditor's report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Business Corporations Act. The financial statements were mailed to the shareholders on May 16, 2021, and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. Three representatives of the auditor are attending the meeting today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for the auditors, Len Wadsworth, Melanie Matthews and Clint Campbell of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Accountants are available to respond. The next item of business is to set the number of directors.

Mr. Chair, my name is Roger Richer.

Roger, can you move to the mic?

I am a registered shareholder, and I move that the number of directors be set at 9.

Are there any questions or discussions on the motion? If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. Are there any more ballots to be collected? [Voting]

The next item of business is the election of directors. The 9 persons proposed by management for election are listed in the circular. All of them have indicated their willingness to serve as directors for the ensuing year. No nominations other than those proposed by management have been received in accordance with the company's advanced notice policy. And accordingly, management nominates for elections -- nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have the nominations for management, post directors?

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as directors: Clive Johnson, Robert Cross, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, Robin Weisman and Liane Kelly.

I would ask for a motion that the 9 directors nominated to be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next Annual General Meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.

I so move.

I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast vote now. Are there any more ballots to be collected? [Voting]

The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Accountants. The management proposes that they be reappointed until the next Annual General Meeting. And I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and that the directors are authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor.

I so move.

Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. Are there any more ballots to be collected? [Voting]

The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass the resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. The background behind this motion and the proposed form of the binding advisory resolution are set out on Page 12 of the circular. In addition, a detailed discussion of the company's executive compensation program is set forth in the Executive Compensation section of the circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shows for the resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. As this is an advisory vote, the results will not be binding upon the Board. However, the Board will take the results of the vote into account as appropriate when considering future executive compensation policies, procedures and discussions. May I have a motion to approve on a nonbinding advisory basis the form of the resolution set out on Page 12 of the circular accepting the company's approach to executive compensation?

I so move.

Are there any questions or discussions with respect to this resolution? As there are no questions or discussion, I direct a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. Are there any more ballots to be collected? [Voting]

That concludes the matters to be voted on. For those registered shareholders and proxy holders who have not voted on all of the resolutions for which the polls remain open, please do so now as I will shortly close all the polls. I'm just going to read that again. That concludes the matter to be voted on -- matters to be voted on. For those registered shareholders and proxy holders who have not voted on all the resolutions for which the polls remain open, please do so now as I will shortly close all such polls. [Voting]

The polls on all such resolutions are now closed. I direct the scrutineer to provide a report on the results of the polls. I now have the preliminary results for the matters set forth in our circular. Based on these preliminary results, I declare that the number of directors of the company be set at 9. As the majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated, the 9 persons nominated have been elected as directors of the company. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Accountants has been reappointed as the auditor until the next Annual General Meeting and the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor. And the resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been carried. After the meeting, upon receipt of the final scrutineers' report on the polls conducted during this meeting, I direct the recording secretary to attach the report of the scrutineer to the minutes of the meeting. As all of the business for which this meeting was called has been completed, following the termination -- all of the business for which this meeting was called has been completed. Following the termination of this formal part of the meeting, registered shareholders and proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments will be invited to do so. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting?

I so move.

Based on the preliminary results, I declare the motion carried and the formal part of this meeting is now terminated. I'd like to thank all the shareholders who voted. We tend to have a very high turnout of shareholder votes, quite remarkable actually. I think around 75% approximately of the shares were voted this year. That's an extraordinary high number for a public company, and we're very pleased to see that level of interest and engagement from our shareholders, so thank you. So that's the formal part of the presentation. Now I'm going to say a few opening remarks, and then we're going to get some of our great executive team up to tell you what we've been doing. This is a cautionary statement, lots of words. What it really means -- this is quite a legal slide. It means that some things I'm going to say are forward-looking and therefore may be subject to change. A lot of you know quite a bit about B2Gold I'm sure. We're going to talk a little bit today about our projects, both the mines in production, our development projects and our -- exciting development projects and exploration opportunities that we see around the world. As you can see from this slide, we're a pretty global company with the 3 producing mines: Fekola Mine in Mali, the Otjikoto Mine in Namibia and the Masbate Mine in the Philippines. We also have exploration and development projects in a number of companies -- countries in the world, rather, including Finland, Uzbekistan, Colombia. Our commitment has always been to be driven more by geology and the opportunity than geography. And as you've seen, we've got a remarkable success in dealing with so many of these different countries with all different challenges for many years now. A few highlights on 2021. One of the things I'm most proud of, I think we all are, and most impressed by is the company's performance during COVID. Obviously, tremendous challenges, different challenges in each of our locations, but the company worked very closely with local communities, local government, federal governments to ensure that we can continue to mine safely. In the countries that we're in, they don't have the luxury of shutting down mining unless it's absolutely necessary. And I found it very rewarding that the governments in the countries we work, our employees, including our unions and our local communities, we all have one thing in common. We want to keep mining as long as we can do it safely because these revenues from mining and jobs are absolutely critical in the economy of these countries. And it was very rewarding because I think it's a great indication of the social license we've earned around the world because of the culture of treating people with fairness, respect and transparency. So when we got together and discussed COVID with each of our operations, we had tremendous support, community, employees, management and the governments. And I think it's really a direct result of earning their trust. And the way you earn people's trust is by treating them with fairness, respect and transparency. And really, one of the most important aspects is delivering on the promises you make in all the locations in which you work. So I want to congratulate all of our employees for the tremendous work that was done during COVID. We did set record gold production for 2021, record production from Otjikoto and Masbate mines. We produced just over 1 million ounces of gold. Consolidated cash operating costs were very low at $535 an ounce, an industry leader in low-cost production. And all-in sustaining costs were $888 per ounce, remaining one of the lowest in the industry. Strong annual consolidated gold revenues of $1.76 billion. These are all U.S. dollars. Strong annual consolidated cash flows from operating activities of $0.76 billion, and also maintained a very strong financial position and liquidity. And we continue to pay an industry-leading dividend of $0.16 a share on an annualized basis. We paid a quarterly dividend and continue to, and it's the highest dividend yield of 4% in the gold mining sector. These are quite remarkable accomplishments, once again, at any time, particularly when you look at the challenges faced due to COVID. We also had great success to continue to develop our development projects and are -- had some great results in our exploration. So in all, it was a tremendous year performance. And I'm not going to steal anyone's thunder here, so you're going to hear a little more from some of the executives about what drove this fairly remarkable performance. As Mike will tell you, we're virtually debt-free and that enables us to pay this world -- this sector-leading dividend, but also maintain a strong cash position for some of our development projects and also for exploration because I think that most people that own shares in B2Gold, I think today, some won't look for the dividend, but also I think they own it because we're a growth company. Over the last 12 years, we've grown from zero gold production to 1 million ounces of gold a year in various countries as you'll see -- or as you've seen. That's one of the driving forces. I think that's one of the reasons why people would like to see us do what we're doing, which is reward the shareholders by paying them a substantial dividend, but also keep a very healthy cash position so we can pursue opportunities in exploration, growth, et cetera. That's a great place to be in our business today. This is -- some of you have seen this before. This chart shows our remarkable growth in gold production over the -- since 2012. Starting off with the mines in Nicaragua, La Libertad and El Limon mines; and then the Masbate Mine in the Philippines, which we acquired by -- we acquired the mine from a smaller company but we did improve it dramatically and brought it down to a much lower cost producer. And then, of course, we went to Namibia with the Otjikoto Mine, which we successfully built on -- under budget, ahead of schedule. And finally, the largest mine in our group, the Fekola Mine in Mali, where we had, again, a tremendous successful construction stage ahead of schedule and on budget. One of the keys to our success is delivering on the promises made. And that's why we have our own construction team. That's why most of our -- we want all of our employees, as many as possible, to be direct B2Gold employees. So there's 5,000 employees out there. We want everyone to have a shirt that says B2Gold Namibia or Mali or the Philippines or Colombia or the other countries that we're working. So I think that's a really important point because that way we're able to ensure that our employees are receiving things like safety training, receiving the full conversation that we intend to get to them by having them as direct employees. And I think it builds an incredible trust in the spirit of the family that is B2Gold. I think that's one of the keys to our success. So here we are now. We're projecting a little over 1 million ounces of gold production again for next year. And the breakdown of production for 2021 was 567,000 ounces from Fekola, 180,000 ounces from Masbate -- sorry, from Otjikoto and 204,000 ounces from the Masbate Mine. This is a fairly telling slide and quite dramatic. This is our operating cash flow growth versus many of our peers. Endeavor has done a very good job in West Africa. We're second here with operating cash flow growth from 2017 to 2022 of 367%, well ahead of many of our peers. I think one of the keys to our cash flow generation is, of course, the low-cost production but it's also the lack of debt load. When we built the -- when we acquired the Fekola mine by taking over a successful Australian company called Papillon, it was quite controversy at the time, in 2016, because very few gold mining companies were growing, unfortunately, because the industry had not done a very good job of growing or had sometimes overpaid for assets. And shareholders were pretty frustrated and pretty disappointed with the performance. So I remember people saying, "Well, I don't -- can't buy your shares because you're trying to grow the company," which tells you how ticked off they were at the sector. I kept on trying to tell them that we are very good at what we did and we were going to continue to grow the company irrespective of some of the critics who questioned whether we could do it or not. But because we didn't want to dilute our shareholders -- in 2016, B2Gold hit a low of $0.80 a share as people doubted we could finance the project. So when we financed the project with debt through the syndicate of excellent banks that Mike and his financial team put together, and those are banks that have been very loyal to us for a number of years partly because we've delivered on the promises that we made to the banks as well. But because we didn't dilute our shareholders when the stock was trading at some of its lowest levels, we used a sensible amount of debt, which we paid back very rapidly to put us in a position today where we are virtually debt-free with the exception of a few mining and equipment leases. So that's some of the reasons why we've been able to show this extraordinary increase in operating cash flow and it continues. Net cash change, once again, pretty remarkable. In '17, we were still in the construction mode, so negative USD 474 million. And then, over the last few years, as you can see from the chart, we rose dramatically to $649 million in net cash change. So a lovely place to be when we look at further growth and further development. Dividend yield, I talked about this already. You can see, against some of our peers, we did a -- we made a very important decision to start the dividend on the belief that we could continue that going for a long period of time and still, as I said, balance out that with the growth of the company as well and funding the growth of the company. Some companies use a percentage of free cash flow for their dividend. We haven't really done that because we're looking at our allocation of capital costs, et cetera. We're comfortable with the dividend level as it is. It's industry-leading, and we intend to keep that dividend. We will consider increasing the dividend as time goes along depending on our cash flow and what other things we have on our plate. Of course, if gold were to go up as it's supposed to do during times of inflation, then, of course, we would consider increasing the level of the dividend. History of creating shareholder value. It's been an up-and-down journey as you can see in terms of the performance in the market. But if you look back to January of '09, we were just over $1 a share. And if you look at it from there up until where we are today at $5 a share -- or just under $5 a share, that's a 961% increase if you bought the shares back in January of '09. Now as you can see from this chart, we hit highs of very close to CAD 10 in 2020. And we responded very well to our success -- our share price responded well to our success and to the gold price when the gold price just barely -- or briefly touched that $2,000 an ounce. Since then, there's been a number of factors, I think, that the gold sector was hit quite hard overall by the disappointment of people in gold not breaking through $2,000 and going much higher. So there was a sell-off in the -- across the gold index, gold shares. We got hit a little harder, and we've recovered some of that. But we got hit a little harder. Let's be frank about it. It's because in part of the perception of political risk. So for us, we've been prepared to go where there's a period of threat around the world, believing that some of the best opportunities are there. Plus we didn't want to play the competitive game of trying to buy projects in established areas where people feel very comfortable investing because there's a lot more competition when you're doing that. So our success is partly based on our willingness to go where there's a period of threat and take on challenges around the world. Historically, we were Bema Gold before B2Gold. And we went to places like Chile before Chile was a hot place for gold mining, and we went to the far east of Russia in 1998 to build a gold mine when gold was $300 an ounce at the time. So the benefit of all that is the performance that we see, and we've seen it for years over and over again, success in all these different countries. And I think because of the corporate culture, because of establishing our social license and the trust of the people we work so we've been able to dramatically grow and see these extraordinary financial results but we get penalized to some extent because of the perception of political risk. So I want to talk a little bit about that. And I know you're going to hear a little bit more about Mali today. Mali's the topic that we get the most often about -- concerns about political risk. But look at our success in Mali and others as well. Randgold, which became Barrick, extremely successful in Mali; and many other companies. Mali has been a very good place to be in the gold mining business for decades. Today, it's a very good place to be in the gold mining business, and I believe in the future, it will be a very good place to be in the gold mining industry. They have a culture that supports mining and the governments that have consistently supported mines, had reasonable taxation levels and has been a great place to be partly because there's more exploration opportunities there where you can get entry cheaper than you can in the established jurisdictions where everyone is competing to buy these development projects. So we've got a long history of extremely disciplined acquisitions, including the Bema days and B2Gold. And it's quite simple really. We'll never acquire a project or a company that has the development approach that we like. We'll never acquire those types of opportunities needing the gold price to go higher or finding more gold, needing those 2 things to justify the purchase price. That's our strategy. When I say it to people, I expect someone's going to say, "Well, duh. Doesn't everybody do that?" In the history of our industry, a lot of that was not happening. It's better now to some extent, but it didn't happen for quite a long time. So we take that very disciplined approach. If you buy a gold stock, in my opinion, a producing gold company, gold prices going to be higher or entry success should be a bonus on top of the share price. We shouldn't need the gold price to go higher or find more gold to either drive our share price or justify our share price at the end of the day. And I talk to lots of generalist funds who aren't gold investors and I say to them, "You should look at B2Gold because of the -- our incredible performance, our highest standards in the industry of ESG, safety of our people and look at our profitability. And if gold's $1,850 or $1830 and we're producing gold today at around $1,000 an ounce all-in sustaining cost, there's a pretty serious profit margin there without -- especially -- particularly without having any corporate debt." So I tell them just pretend we're producing widgets. So if we can produce widgets for $1,000 a widget and sell them at $1,850 a widget, that's pretty damn good business. So we're not as perhaps obsessed or driven by the gold price that some other companies are. Some of them are because their costs are a lot higher. But at the end of the day, we've never been what we call gold bugs in this company and Bema as well. We've never believed that gold has to go higher. That's a very dangerous game to play. That's when you make bad acquisitions. That's when you overpay for things. So that discipline has been a big part of what we've done. So yes, it's been disappointing to see the share price when very little has changed in the company. In fact, things have gotten better, more cash flow, the dividend, et cetera, since we hit our highs in 2020 and the stock's half of that level. And the gold price has only gone from touching $2,000 to down at around $1,700 now -- about $1,830 as we speak today. So it's a little -- it is somewhat confusing to some extent. But the problem partly, in part -- and I'm not an expert, but what I see in the sector and the investment world, it's very nervous times right now and there's a bit of a liquidity crisis. So on a liquidity crisis, people sell everything, sometimes including gold and sometimes their gold shares. So we have a lot of nervous investors out there who are sometimes looking for reasons to buy shares and sometimes looking for reasons not to. We have to continue to tell those people, if the excuse is because we're in Mali or other places, listen to us. Don't judge us by other people's success or failure, and don't judge us because of the countries we're in. Look at what we've been able to do in these countries and look at the driving force that these countries have given us to be able to achieve this incredible accomplishment. So that's the message to the shareholders. Patience isn't always easy. We haven't performed that far from the actual sector. We're down about 4% year-to-date. And the sector was -- gold was up 2%. The sector was up 1%, the gold indexes. So we haven't been that out of the pace, but it is obviously disappointing to see this. I'm extremely confident we're just going to keep doing what we're doing, and you're going to hear today about some dramatic growth opportunities. One of the ones we're very excited about, just looking at this terrific expansion at Fekola, which you'll hear a little bit about. So we appreciate the shareholder support and patience. Enjoy the dividend. It will continue. And I do think we're going to see a recovery in the gold sector overall. And maybe, just maybe, gold is still a safe haven during times of uncertainty, war and inflation. A lot of people say gold hasn't done what it's supposed to do. It's actually been a good store of value because it's maintained a very solid gold price when many other things, bitcoin and other things, are getting hammered. So gold has performed relatively well in that regard. I do think there may be a delayed reaction here, and I think that we may see gold prices go higher with the current situation we see. But it's nice not to have to depend on that. At the end of the day, we are highly leveraged to gold. For every $100 that gold goes up, there's another approximately USD 100 million of profits -- gross profits to this company. So yes, we're highly leveraged to gold, but we're performing extremely well without having to see gold higher. Just a couple of minutes more for me. The corporate strategy, we're going to continue to do what we've done well during that remarkable period of growth for over 12 years that we've seen. We still maintain one of the highest standards of safety for our employees and still maintain some of the industry-leading cutting-edge ESG programs in our communities that we work. So while you're growing really rapidly, sometimes a few things may fall a little bit behind. So pleased to see, in our case, that they didn't fall behind at all. So we were able to grow dramatically, including during COVID, and we were still able to maintain the highest -- one of the highest standards in our industry. We're very proud of that. We're going to continue to maximize profitable gold production from existing mines. You've seen in the case of Fekola we expanded the mill twice after building it initially at very low cost. Because we planned -- what if we find more gold? Let's make sure we're building a mill -- that we can expand the mill relative cheaply to accommodate that, and you'll hear a bit more about that. That's been an incredible success story. We started off with projecting 300,000 ounces a year at Fekola. We've now been up to 600,000 ounces a year. So continue to maximize the 3 mines -- production from the 3 mines. We're also going to continue our great success in turning -- increasing mineral reserves and mineral resources. Just a quick comment on that. One of the confusing things in the industry for investors sometimes is what's the difference between indicated reserves and inferred reserves. Inferred reserves, depending on who you're talking to, kind of you have a lot of arm waving involved. In fact, they may never very often be mined. So there's a lot of -- there's just probably some suspicion around inferred resources. But this group with Tom Garagan and his tremendous exploration team and our engineering group, we have an extraordinary success of turning inferred resources with further drilling -- closer-space drilling into indicated resources, becoming reserves. So when you look at our -- the companies in our sector, ask yourself about the quality of those inferred resources. In our case, we probably have about an 80% track record of turning inferred resources into indicated resources. So we're going to continue that, and we're going to continue an aggressive exploration program. I think Tom's budget this year is around $65 million. He's going to talk about that. Exploration is a key to our success. It always has been. These ounces will always be the ones you find and we found a lot of them. Yes, we do accretive acquisitions and it seems we find more gold, which is the bonus, but we're also very good at finding it. And I think that makes us a bit of a unique company in the gold space today or at least unusual. We're unusual because of the fact that we are now a well-respected builder of mines and operator mines and a great performer, including the dividend, but we're still very entrepreneurial. That's where we came from. Bema and B2GOld were both born out of exploration. When you're in the exploration game, one, you appreciate your shareholders and you appreciate the people that help you succeed. But we're in that stage -- you do take risks. I call them measured risks. Whether it's geology, whether it's geography, take measured risks. Unfortunately, most big gold producers are not very good at exploration. It's the juniors normally who are hungrier, who generate the projects that the bigger companies take over and build into mines. So we've done some of that, but we have the ability to do both. Tom and his team, a lot of us have been together for 40 years. It's quite remarkable. But Tom understood very early on in our career the importance of economic geology. For me to go out and raise money to continue what we're doing through the good markets and the bad markets, always committed to exploration, we needed to be focused on results and focused on economics, not just proving geologic theories. So I think that makes us a little bit different in our world because we have all -- we can tick all the boxes and then some of all the things you expect of a disciplined, responsible gold producer but we still have an entrepreneurial flair or spirit. We will still go where there a period of threat, and that's where some of the best opportunities come from. So continue focusing on the development pipeline. You'll hear a bit about -- a bit more about that. We're going to talk quite a bit of growth today and our greenfield exploration projects, once again, using our extraordinary team to see if we can make major discoveries around the world. We're also looking to continue to look at acquisition opportunities. We've done some very good ones. As I said, being very disciplined about that. We're going to continue to do that. But it's harder now because the gold price is at a pretty good level and there's more competition than when we built Fekola, for example, with no competition to acquire that very good asset. So it gets a little bit tougher to do deals, but we're very -- we're looking at lots of things. But I'm a little ambivalent about M&A or just acquisitions because I like the growth profile we have. Our shares are clearly undervalued. I think there's 14 mining analysts who follow us -- 15, and 14 of them have us as a buy or an outperform in their projections for the future. The average target price for 14 analysts is CAD 8.11 share. We are trading at just under $5. So there's belief in that -- in the sector as well, which is one of the reasons I'm encouraged that we're going to see our share price recover as we carry on going forward. But M&A is also difficult because you need willing partners to do it. So you need people to do what we did in Bema when Kinross approached us to take us over. It was not what we wanted. Management did not want that and our Board did not want that because we were building a great mine in Russia and we were a great company and we put our hearts and souls in it for years. But we did the responsible thing. As directors of the company and executives, our job is to build value for shareholders. It is our legal duty actually. Unfortunately, in the sector today, and we've seen it for some time, we see a number of management or directors of companies who just think it's their company. They don't feel that they should take an offer from someone like us even if it's perhaps a premium offer, that they should take it to their shareholders. I strongly disagree with that. And we walked the other side of that. We did not want to sell to Kinross. It wasn't our decision -- I've always maintained it's not my decision, it's not the executives' decision, it's not the Board's decision. It's the shareholders who we work for. And they have the right to make decisions about do you want to stay with the management, the company that's there, do you want to consider being taken over on a friendly basis at good value by a bigger company. So that is -- remains a frustration in the sector. And I'm hoping that more and more shareholders start pushing more and more executive teams and directors to do their fiduciary duty, to let the shareholders decide the future. We can't do what we do if we're not public. And I find many people who are public -- new leaders of public companies often call shareholders and brokers and bankers and pretty much everybody else necessary evils. Well, partly the reason, I guess, why we respect our shareholders and our bankers and brokers and everyone that we deal with is because we started an exploration a couple of times. It was really tough. So I had to go run around the world trying to raise money for exploration projects that weren't always popular, and that way you build partnerships with people who help you raise the money. So I've never considered shareholders or consultants or all the other people that we work with, bankers and brokers as necessary evils, far from it. They are one of the reasons we succeeded. So I think that's perhaps an important distinction that we all and public companies need to continue to remind ourselves, how did we get here and who do we work for. So I'm going to leave it there for now, and I'm going to ask Mike Cinnamond to come up and talk a little bit about our financial position today.

All right. Thank you, Clive. Although Clive said he wasn't going to steal anyone's thunder, he already told you all the good bits about the financials. So I'll try and fill in -- try and not repeat myself too much and fill in some of the detail. I also want to say just before I start it's great to see everybody here, and welcome to those of you who are shareholders. But there are quite a few folks that's the united nations of B2Gold here in the room today. You can see folks from all around the world. So I hope you get a chance to catch up and meet them. So I'm going to give you a few highlights on the financials. As Clive said, record annual total gold production in the current year, more than 1 million ounces. We revised our guidance upwards during the year, and then we almost hit the top end of the revised guidance. So great performance led by Fekola as well as the power mine in Mali. Fekola, it's benefiting just from the throughput of the mill, a mill that we budgeted for the year to do 7.75 million tonnes per annum, that by the end of the year was doing 9 or more. So a lot more throughput there. And even though we put some lower-grade ounces through to feed the mill, we still had an excellent production from Fekola. Masbate had a record year, 222,000 ounces and kind of the same story that we've seen from Masbate in other years. Just the recoveries are better, the oxide content of the ore that we're pulling there was better and so better recoveries and more ounces. And in fact, we did so well against budget we're actually able to take some unscheduled time to do some mill maintenance there because we were so far ahead of schedule. And then Otjikoto, annual record, 196,000 -- sorry, 198,000 ounces, higher grades. We were mining Wolfshag open pit through the whole year and reached a higher-grade zone of that in the third quarter, and we saw the benefit of that and record results for Otjikoto. Same on the results side. Cash operating cost, $535 per ounce produced within our range -- our guidance range that we gave for the year, reflects the strong operating results, as I mentioned there, from all of the company's operations and higher production. But that was offset. We're seeing inflation -- some inflation in costs near the end of last year, 2021, and stronger local currencies. And we take that into account. Those have offset and we still came in within our guidance range. Same story for the all-in sustaining costs. $888 per ounce sold is at the lower end of our guidance range of $870 to $910. And that -- it just mirrors the performance that we saw on the cash operating cost side. A couple of general comments about inflation. It's definitely a current topic I'll talk a little bit more about when I talk about our 2022 budgeted guidance. But we definitely saw it hit a bit more in 2021, and it's even more significant now in 2022. And one of our main costs that impacts all our operations is fuel. We're seeing inflation in fuel cost just like all other mining operations. So just to get a little bit of insight, we're trying to protect ourselves against that in a couple of different ways. The first is we do have a fuel derivative program. We hedge against fuel costs, and we've been realizing the benefit of that for a while. At the end of 2021, the value of that hedge book was about $15 million, where it was going to benefit us by $15 million versus current costs. By the end of the first quarter of this year, that was worth $30 million. So it just gives you an idea of how much fuel is going up and therefore, how much the hedge book is going to help us a bit as we go through the current year. The other thing we did in fuel is we have solar farms. We have solar farms at each of the Otjikoto and Fekola operations. And I look at those like permanent fuel hedges, that they're basically a way to try and permanently reduce your costs -- your fuel costs. And it probably saves us somewhere around 17% to 18% of our mill energy cost by producing that through solar. So great program that we have, great CSR program and also a great economic program. Gold revenues for 2021, $1.8 billion. We realized just under $1,800 an ounce. And good news is we're seeing even higher realized gold prices as we come through 2022 so far year-to-date. It's very hard to tell what gold price is going to do. It depends on who you listen to. It's almost like you see the same facts every day and a different conclusion is reached by the analysts. They're worried about inflation. They're worried about deflation. They're worried about stagflation. There's a war in the Ukraine. There's U.S.-Chinese relations. There's global supply chain disruption. There's concern about what the banks are doing in reaction to recent rates to combat inflation and therefore, impact gold. Who knows what's right and how to interpret them? The good news, I think, for gold is that everyone is worried about something, and so far, that seems to be benefiting the price. So we're seeing the benefit for us in the kind of cash flows we're generating, as Clive ably described earlier. I should say as well we're not hedged against any of our primary product gold, where any impact or benefit to gold price flows straight through to the bottom line. Cash flow from operating activities, this $724 million. Proud to say that we got that completely wrong when we forecast it, but we got that wrong in a good way. So we had to reforecast $650 million for last year and we came in at $724 million. So that's a great result. A couple of factors in there, but the big one is we produced more gold, sold more, realized more cash flow. And then we also had lower cash tax payments than we thought originally. But tax payment is still high. We're a big contributor to the tax coffers of the countries that we operate in. And in 2021, total tax payments in cash were $340 million. So big contributions to each of the countries where we produce. Now I'm going to just comment on 2022 guidance, just a few thoughts. Gold production, it's in the middle of our -- it's roughly $1 million (sic) [ 1 million ounces ] midrange that we gave, pretty similar to the current year, close to record levels that we saw in 2021. Maybe to highlight as well. For the Fekola component of that, it includes production from Cardinal, which was our discovery that we started mining from later last year, but it doesn't include any potential upside from the Anaconda area that we're currently working on, Bill will describe in more detail, which could come in as early as late 2022, depending on which sequence we developed it in. So the strong production for 2022, again, led by Fekola. We did budget 9 million tonnes for the year production -- or throughput now that we see the mill operating as well as it is. So -- and that's reflected in our guidance for 2022. I would say production -- like all the factors here, costs and cash flows, production is definitely weighted half 1 versus half 2. So about 40% of our production will occur in first half of the year and 60% in the second half, and that's due to the stripping campaigns that we've been doing and the timing of accessing some of the higher-grade zones in the year. So that impacts the cost profiles for the first half versus second half and also the cash flows. Cash operating costs, budgeted $620 million to $660 million. So again, it's a bit higher than last year. It's probably $120 an ounce higher than 2021. And like I was mentioning, a bunch of that is -- a component of that is, for sure, inflation. We reckon somewhere just south of 60% of that total cost increase is driven by inflation. Again, it's fuel, mechanical components, labor cost increases and some stronger foreign exchange and things like -- the Namibian dollar, for example, for Otjikoto mine. Then the remaining increase, approximately 40% of the increase, that comes from just a change in the way we're operating, the change in the sequencing, change in the areas that we're operating, whether it's stripping a higher grade -- or a higher strip ratio area like Cardinal or the development of the Wolfshag underground, all of which is slightly higher cost profile. All-in sustaining cost range, just somewhere north of $1,000 an ounce. It's impacted by the same factors and impacted roughly in the same percentage-wise in terms of what's inflation and what's an operational type issue. Gold revenues for the year, $1.8 billion, pretty close to what we saw in 2021. Cash flows we have forecasted -- or given guidance of cash flows for $625 million per year. That's based on $1,800 gold and a couple of offsetting factors in there. We are seeing cost increases like I said, so that is impacting cash flows. But it's also offset by some lower income tax payments in 2022 compared to 2021. Maybe the next slide, just -- this is just a brief snapshot of how we did in the first quarter of 2022. So how are we doing against our guidance? On the production side, just under 210,000 ounces. It's a good start. It's about 8,000 ounces more than we budgeted, and it's just excellent performance. All 3 mines were above budget for the Q. If you look at the cash operating cost, you can see $699 per ounce produced. That looks high maybe when you look at the guidance range for the year, but remember the weighting. So the cost in the first 2 quarters of the year are forecast to be much higher than the second half because of the weighting of production. So against budget, that $699 is actually a very good result. It's almost $100 less than budget, which sounds wrong when I just described the inflationary impacts that are -- that we are experiencing. But what we did see was fuel cost in Mali for the Q were actually lower than we thought it would be. They are set in advance there by the government, and we saw some time lag there between the higher fuel costs actually flowing through. So we saw the benefit in our results. It was offset by higher costs for fuel at the other 2 operations. But in that, we came in under budget on the cost side. And all-in sustaining costs at 1 million -- $1,036 per ounce, same story. It looks a little higher than compared to the range, but again, it's supposed to be higher still for the budget. So we've actually beat budget by over $300 an ounce, which is the benefit of those lower cash operating costs and the timing of some CapEx that was originally scheduled to be done earlier in the quarter but will be done later in the year. Final comment I'd make, we are seeing cost inflation for 2022. But we did look at it again at the end of the first quarter. We took into account where we saw ourselves at the end of the first quarter, the beat we had and also what we saw happening for the rest of the year. And in our view, although we do see cost inflation, we still think we -- with higher production than what we're seeing and with where we are, that we'll come in within our cost guidance ranges, so we didn't re-guide. Then the final, final comment -- Randall told me there's only 2 buttons, it's really hard to get it wrong. And I got it wrong. See, Randall, your faith in me is totally justified. Final comment just on liquidity. Again, I touched on this pretty ably. So we are in a great position, $650 million at the end of the first quarter in the bank. We do have a revolver undrawn, $600 million face capacity, another $200 million additional accordion feature, so up to $800 million available there. We are in a strong net cash position. Because of that, we've been paying this high dividend that Clive described. But we are also in good shape if we want to do anything more on the M&A side, an acquisition, anything like that. There could be a cash component to it, like Clive described in the scenario where we did Fekola, where we want to use the cash flows from our operations and just some sensible debt. We're in a great position now to be able to use cash to do the next project if and when we pick one to do. And it's a good place to be, and it's an easy story to tell. So thank you. With that, I'll pass it on to Bill.

So there's only 2 buttons. So I wanted to talk about our operational production over the last 2021 and 2022. But I feel that it's actually probably more germane, if you'll allow me, to expand it just a little bit. Because I think when you're talking about the success that we had, I really think you have to start maybe back when COVID first hit because, remember, there was this whole global pandemic going on and people were worried about what was going to happen. Operations were declaring force majeure and shutting down. What I would tell you is, for us, it was actually a bit of the opposite. It was a bit of a test run for what our next couple of years would look like. And I started out with the occupational health and safety where I show that in 2021, we had one of our best years ever in occupational health and safety, brought more people home safely than ever. And this is really a tribute to the guys -- the men and women that are working on site and what they're doing for the company. You have to remember, at the time of COVID, we locked down the sites. We made people have longer shifts. We kept people longer during the day. And on top of that, we're in jurisdictions where, one, the employees are not necessarily used to this kind of heavy mechanized equipment and so day in and day out, we're really kind of stressing -- having to stress the importance of health and safety. But two, where we work, rightfully so, the government is always asking us to nationalize the workforce, to try and bring as many of the locals into the management team as possible. So you have to imagine the challenge where you're keeping people longer on site, you're promoting people that may not have the 20 to 30 years experience and then you're telling everybody, "We want you to be safe." And so it really is a tribute to the management teams all around the world and quite frankly, the corporate office, where we kind of have done this visibly felt leadership that has really brought us into what I would call world-class standards. Remember, we're comparing ourselves on these charts against companies that are working in Canada and North America. I titled this one Solutions, Not Excuses for kind of the same reasons. If you look at what has happened over the last 3 years since 2019, to us, you could pick any one of those issues, certainly the COVID pandemic, and say, "Well, there's a reason. We couldn't get supplies. We couldn't get people in." Or maybe the first coup in Mali, that now suddenly, we've got a problem there. Can we deal with the government? Or I didn't even list some of these. We had typhoons in Masbate. We had droughts in Namibia. I mean I used to say I wake up quite early in the morning to try and kind of catch the guys in Africa to make sure there's no issues. And the first thing I always do is kind of have -- when I open, scroll through the e-mails. And for a while there, I was kind of afraid to see what was going to come up, right, because it may Be, "Oh, here's another coup in Mali. Oh, wait. Now there's sanctions in Mali." But it's a tribute to the management. And just humor me a second. I remember when I was a younger engineer and I've had a good year for B2, and Clive actually at this meeting called me out by name. And for me, it was like really kind of life changing. Oh, he recognized me. So I do want to call out like the GM and the President from Masbate. There's Dan Moore and Cris Acosta. And then Ray Mead for Mali -- Fekola. And currently, we have a management team in Mali. So I do want to call them out. Ibrahim Touré and Birama Cissé right here, Issa Diarra and [ Emory Kaisen ] and our legal there, [ Silhata Bali ] who didn't get to come. And then in Namibia, we've got Mark Dawe as the Managing Director and Eric Barnard. I saw him over here somewhere. All of these people really are the keys to what we do. And so I get to stand up here and say how great we are, but they're the people in the trenches really doing the work. So I appreciate what you're doing. Just what you can see, they've already talked about this, we continue to grow. We had another record production year. And we're going to talk about ESG here in a bit after -- or I think before exploration. And of course, it's only a sliver of what we actually do there. It's just a tasting of all the good stuff we're doing, but I'm very proud of everything we do. Whether it's human resources, health and safety, ESG, production, I think B2 is in a bit of a class unto itself. So not only did we do operations well last year, of course, we also had to continue to develop the country -- or the company. A couple of just real quick -- I think everyone is aware of the Gramalote Project, which is in Colombia. Dale Craig is managing that. We inherited a feasibility study that we were -- or a pre-feas that we were going to create a feasibility. We got done with it. And while it was positive, we thought that it wasn't quite a B2 project. It wouldn't have been the way we would actually want to build it. But because it actually pulled a permit, we tried to fit it into that. We made a decision to go back in 2022 and optimize that. So that study, we're just getting ready to come out with here in Q3. We'll see how that goes. The Otjikoto mine, another good one really related to COVID and what's going on. It's one of the few times that B2 has actually used a contractor, and it's because of the length of the underground mine. The original mine developer, we weren't real happy with. Quite frankly, it didn't perform what I would call to B2 standards. And the guys on the ground made a tough decision -- a very tough decision in the middle of development to pull that contractor and move in a different direction. And it was clearly the right decision. They've now turned it around. And what we're talking about is in Q3, we will start to see gold coming out from underground at the Otjikoto mine. In the Fekola mine, I think everyone's aware that this is a project which started out as a 4 million tonne per annum mill, was expanded during construction to 5 million tonnes, was operating at 6.5 million to 7 million. We expanded it again for limited capital once again, thanks to John Rajala, our VP of Metallurgy. And now we're currently sitting at 9 million tonnes per annum. And that's important as we talk about how are we going to continue to increase our growth profile. We've also -- we also started into 2021 looking at an underground, right? So basically, the Fekola deposit has 8 consecutive pits leading further -- in further depth. So we started looking at what happens after that eighth phase when we get into the inferred resource. So in 2021, we looked at an underground study, which we'll talk about in just a minute, which really made us believe that in 2022, we could develop and begin actually starting construction of the access in 2023. I think everyone is aware of the Anaconda area, which is 20 kilometers to the north. I'll talk more about that in just a bit. That's part of what I think Peter Montano was calling the Fekola complex now. So now if you look -- jump from 2021 to 2022, we're now in the final throes of our feasibility study for Gramalote. The economics are just coming in now. It is a bit too early to really talk about. And what I will tell you is that we have absolutely seen some very positive reductions in capital costs, which we had hoped for. But of course, as I think everyone is aware with the global inflation, we're going to give some of that back. So we'll see where that comes out. And certainly, by the end of Q3, we'll be ready to talk about it. And as I've already talked about, the Otjikoto mine, the underground development is now fully going. There was a short ramp-up period kind of in Q1, but they're looking very good now, and we're very happy with how that's progressing. So as I said, the Fekola mine, we ramped up to 9 million tonnes per annum. So the question is why is that really beneficial, right? Because you could kind of imagine that if we had optimized previously our throughput, then we probably already took the high grade and then we'd have to start shoving low grade through. So actually, maybe not the best thing to do. But the reality is because of the exploration success that Tom's group has had, we're now finding higher grade ounces to supplement in particular some of the saprolite feed which goes through on top of our regular ore feed. So we're now talking about, as I said, 9 million tonnes per annum with up to 15% of saprolite. The Anaconda area, they updated the mineral resource. So if you look at now -- just look at those numbers there, the indicated and inferred, you're now talking about over 3 million ounces, right? If you think back to what Fekola was originally when B2 acquired it, we're not that far off now from what we put at Fekola. So that's why we're starting to believe that there's a very real possibility that there's the potential for a second mill within the region. I want -- I put this map up because I wanted to show you our holding of where we are within the belt. What you can see down there at the bottom, kind of that green circle, that's the Fekola pit. And what you see is the Medinandi license there. That was the original license that we had when we built the Fekola mine. We acquired the Menankoto South and the Bantako North licenses, but we also picked up the Bakolobi license there in between. The Bakolobi license is strategic for us and one that it gives us 25 linear kilometers of contiguous strike along the Fekola deposit. And two, it gives us more room if we would like to actually build a second facility because, quite frankly, given the success that Tom's having up there, we're looking for land if we want to build another mill. We are going to develop in 2022 3 projects, okay? The first project is the -- what we're calling the phase 1 Anaconda project. The phase 1 Anaconda project is a trucking study. It looks at if we were going to go to Bantako North or Menankoto South or a combination of the 2 and truck some of that material to Fekola while we were trying to figure out what would happen with the rest of the resource, what would that look like. We believe -- well, that study is actually in the can right now. It's positive. We're now trying to figure out the best way to permit it and what happens with all the licensing. Depending on which way we go, we believe that Bantako North will probably come first and that we could maybe at the end of this year, probably early in 2023 start trucking material down to Fekola, supplementing the ore feed. The second study we're talking about is an optimized study. If you can see -- so we've got those 4 licenses there, but we also -- we're also in the process of acquiring Oklo Resources, which is to the east of these licenses. What that gives us is that gives us a bit of a regional play, right? And so we're talking about a second mill. We're talking about where we're trucking material from, what sequence it is. So we're not -- we've gone back to [ Little Resources ], which is a company out of Australia that did the optimization for us originally at Fekola, to look at how do we optimize the entire, as Peter Montano calls it, Fekola district. So we're looking at all of that right now. And that study will be done by the end of the year. The third study which is very interesting -- as I said, we've got 8 phases of open pit. We're currently working in phases 6 and 7. We looked at what would happen after that. And what we've done, and I'll talk about it a little bit more, is we looked at the underground resource and can we build a mine -- an underground mine and extend the life of mine. The answer -- the initial estimate, and remember it's still initial when I talk about this, is a resounding yes. So this just quickly points out all of the different resources that we have, and I'm not going to go through all of these kind of line by line. But really, the underground one, what you can see there is that 261,000 ounces. That's an open pit resources inferred and indicated, and that's what we'll use to develop our underground. The interesting ones -- so if you look at the Anaconda in conjunction, that's where you get to 3 million. Then Oklo is sitting there at just over 500,000 ounces -- 700,000 if you do indicated and inferred. Talking about the underground. Basically, what we looked at is we wanted to see does it make sense now to start the development in 2023. And so this study that we've already completed wasn't really looking at how many ounces could we produce. It doesn't make financial sense. So we took the open pit resource, we basically applied an underground mine to it and took a quick look at the economics as far as what we knew from things we were doing to maybe other internal costs that we had. And what it showed is that you should put this thing into development as quick as possible. Remember, it's still an inferred resource. But our plan currently is that we will develop the access to it where we can drill it off underground. So I think the current plan is in Q1 of 2023, pending Board approval, to come and develop this -- get the development in so we could actually see some ounces coming out, high-grade ounces, from 2025. And that's really it, I'd like to say, from my side. I'm very proud of everything that everyone has done. And certainly, I'm very proud of not only the production side, which I talked about today, but everything you'll hear after this is really what the B2 legacy is. Thank you. With that, I'll turn it over to Ibrahim Touré and Ray Mead from Mali.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Bill, for the honor to be here representing Mali and talking a little bit about the political situation at present in Mali. The situation is pretty complex, right? There's a lot of things being said, but we're trying to expand a little bit. And as Clive so aptly put it, it's all about the perceptions, right? So the situation is pretty complex. Mali went through multidimensional crises in the past few years or so. But what is most important is that the team that we have in Mali, we have been able to actually keep, maintain and nurture a very, very transparent and constructive relationship with all the stakeholders. So this is at the national level -- I mean at the local level with the community and the traditional chief of villages, at the regional level with the administration and all the way to the national level with the government and key stakeholders like the Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Finance to develop and establish a long-lasting relationship where B2Gold is recognized as a key player in the mining sector in Mali today. And that is very, very exemplary and very important to us in terms of what we are achieving currently in Mali. So during all these periods, right, the current authorities that are in place there, that have been in power since 2020 following a coup -- of course, everybody is aware of that, the coup in 2020 and some few young military took over power. But you have to understand that there's a lot of positives also behind all of this because they're getting tremendous support from the population. This is something that actually was led by people demonstrating and requesting for a change because the democracy that was established wasn't necessarily going into the right direction. So people have requested for a change, and these young military leaders came and brought that change. And ever since, there are palpable -- tangible actions that are being undertaken that are really, I will say, somehow a constructive and fully defining investment in Mali. And you can already see in terms of government, there's already a lot of positive results there. And then just in general, if you look at it, even on the security front, right, which is the key aspect, on the security front, today, you see lots of positive results, whether it's in the central area or the northern part of Mali, which are the [ second home ] of everything that is taking place. In terms of governance as well, you can see that these people are doing a wonderful job in terms of financial delinquency and fight against corruption. So lots of positive things to be credited to the current authorities. But in all of that, the most important is, of course, returning to a civilian rule, which they have indicated recently, that in March 2024 they will hold the next election. So until then, they will be in power. But as far as now, everything is going very well. They have started working on the independent organization that will organize the election. And all of this is with a strong support from the population who feels really comfortable with this young leadership that have been established, and they have shown that they are doing a great job. So as I said, they have given a calendar of 24 months with about 14 months left now. And this has created a bit of tension with ECOWAS. ECOWAS is the regional institution in charge of political and economic development of West Africa, the kind of body that are overseeing this whole process. And they haven't been able to agree on an acceptable calendar, what they have called an acceptable calendar, which they wanted it to be a year. And the Malian authorities felt like a year was too short. So that's why they decided and announced that it will be a 2-year process. And ECOWAS hasn't agreed to that yet, but there are some negotiations underway. And hopefully, on July 3, in a few days, there will be a new summit held on Mali, and hopefully, they'll come to an agreement. So all of this has created some -- I will say, some diplomatic war with some nations, especially France, which is the traditional colonial power in Mali. And then all of this -- the position of the new authorities, which is kind of different from all other traditional government that we had, was to take matters into their own hand and trying to show that in Mali, we're capable of achieving certain things, especially on the security front. And this had, I would say, opened to new partnerships with new countries such as Russia, such as Turkey and other nations of the Middle East. And that wasn't really appreciated by the traditional colonial power, France. And it has created some tension, and you'll see it in the media and everything that is happening. But in reality, this is to the benefit of the country, we believe, and it can be felt today, that we're taking our destiny into our own hands and things are moving quickly. There are new allies or cooperation with Guinea and Mauritania. Because ECOWAS -- Mali is a landlocked country and ECOWAS nations surround the country. So with them having their border closed and everything, it was an issue to get some of the products. I will talk about that in the next slide. But in all of this, we have to see that there is a lot of support still for the country in terms of international community. The UN is still present there, and we're getting, again, strong support from lot of nations. So what all of this really means for us as a mining company, I just want to share a few points with you. The fact that most investments -- mining investments are FDI, foreign direct investment, in general that took place in the country all went without any interruption, any stoppage in the production. And in all of this, you have to understand, I think Clive and Mike both mentioned, the importance of the mining industry in the overall economy. Like in Mali, the mining sector represents 10% of the GDP, 70% of all export products and 25% of all taxes collected by the government. So it's a key sector. And in just a few years -- we showed on the graph earlier from Bill, when B2Gold came into play in 2016, in just a few years, we have positioned ourselves already as one of the key operators in Mali that is world recognized. And today, we produce about 1/3 of the country gold. And again, as I said, it is very fulfilling to hear Malian authorities and key stakeholders talk about what we are doing in the country and how it's been beneficial to the country. In terms of economic contribution, we're doing really an extensive job. From 2016 to 2021, we contributed to the economy over $984 million, and these are -- numbers are key, right? Because Mali, of course, being one of the poorest countries in the world, these numbers really, really weigh a lot in the country's economy, and we are proud to be a contributor to that. So I have so much to say about this political situation. It's fascinating. But in all, the most important is to -- for us to maintain this strong relationship with the key stakeholders. And of course, we have that Canadian DNA in our culture, which is our guiding principle of fairness, transparency and respect. And this is showcased every day in our approach, and it's very, very well received by the countrymen. So with all that said, I will now turn it over to Ray Mead to give us more details in terms of what we do in terms of initiatives in ESG and all the good things that we're doing.

Okay. Thanks, Ibrahim. As has been spoken about a little bit already by Bill, by Mike, by Clive, Fekola over the last 2 years has certainly been an area of growth for B2Gold. We've done that despite the distractions of government change. We've also soldiered on through a global pandemic. At the same time, we've doubled the size of the mining operation, increased the size of the mill. So done major construction work through this period. And at the same time, we've constructed 32-megawatt solar power plant, again, to really put us at the forefront of looking at green power to obviously have positive impacts on our power costs for the operation. So through the last couple of years, we've managed to commission this plant. And just to say to date, it has outstripped original feasibility numbers. To date, we produced 16.7% of our power from that solar power source. But the actual real annualized rate is somewhere around 21%, 22%. So it's really got huge benefits for our operation. Greenhouse gases, as you can see on the slide, significant reductions in a lot of the greenhouse gases. And the main contributor there is we drop our HFO consumption by between 10 million and 12 million liters per annum needed to run the diesel powerhouse. On the local employment, local content front. Again, when I say we've doubled the size of our mining fleet and expanded our mill, what that actually meant is we've actually picked up an extra 1,000 employees during the pandemic. So no small task to bring them on site, keep them safe, keep them healthy, and then get training into them, all the while trying to maintain an isolated approach for the mine site to ensure we didn't have external impacts to community around us and the likes. So in an impoverished African setting like we are, health is not highly regarded and certainly not well catered for around us. So any contribution we've been able to have in that setting certainly by stopping anything COVID related from expanding outside those borders has been certainly well regarded by community around us. And we've actually set up the only privately run COVID lab in the state of Mali. So a significant benefit we do testing for all external parties around the district that the mine site sits in. On the gender front, we come up against, obviously, cultural norms, cultural issues within Mali, where female employees or females are not seen as being priority targets from a community perspective to find employment for, but we've done what we can, where we can and try to cater as much as possible towards getting as many women into our workforce as possible, training them up and getting good development into them so that they can take on higher and higher jobs within the operation. On the overall workforce front, we have active training and mentorship programs. We have 84 senior Malian National mid-level managers that are being actively mentored by a small expatriate work group on site with the idea that, obviously, as positions come up and as we continue to grow, we have people that can step into these roles without bringing additional expats on to the mine site. So it takes a lot of effort alongside running the mine, but that's something that we've really set ourselves to do. We're focused on making sure that we put back to our national workforce as much as we can and get their development to the highest level possible. Mining in Mali has also been in a position of growth right across the board. So again, we've had to make sure our training can keep up to some change out of employees and make sure we've got the next person coming along. On the local content front, local content, I think certainly through Mali, there's been significant interest from the government. They garner a lot of income from the mines, and the more we can put back through purchasing locally, the better off we're going to be seen, and certainly, the happier the government are going to be with the performance of the operation in the country. So there's a graph there that shows continuous growth on how much purchasing we do onshore versus offshore. We continue to look at ways of developing local content and purchasing as well as Mali in general sort of thing. There's some numbers there really to show that, obviously, from a national front, there's significant growth in the national residents. The local area is one that we're looking to beef up a bit more, mainly through our catering and camp group. We're looking at opportunity for supplies, for services and amongst the local group. We have local catering groups now looking after one of our new camps that we put in during the COVID phase. So again, it's a work in progress, but there is development, and we're seeing good results from local people being able to step in and do things that we originally didn't think possible, but certainly now, they're really walking the walk. Some key CSR activities. I think as Bill has shown in his maps, our footprint is rapidly expanding. It is growing just towards the end of last year and into this year. The new Cardinal development has come online. Again, it sits on where the old Fadougou settlement used to be. So we're -- when Fekola was set up and Fadougou Village was moved, it was seen as something that was good to do rather than had to be done. But now, with what we've seen now in the rapid growth of the operation, there's no way we could be expanding as we have without those decisions in the early days. The actual village of Fadougou, the new village of Fadougou has become a central hub for some quite small impoverish villages around the operation, particularly on the health care front. So one of our major projects at the moment is getting a health training program in place where we use the central health service in New Fadougou as a center of a network where we expand out and train all the community health workers and local midwives, and they can all function out of the new nucleus and we can branch out into all directions. That's starting to take hold. We had a bit of a slowdown through COVID because it was very difficult for us to get out into the communities and then come back to site, but we're now actively doing it for the last 9 to 12 months, seeing good results already. It's also an expandable program where as we bring on the Menankoto villages and things like that, it's easy to expand into those areas. So straight away, we can show impact to these other communities that they're not seeing at the moment. We can really address some quite basic issues that they have very early on in a project cycle. So that's where we're moving in regards to health in the local district. Livelihood restoration, again, is a big issue because our footprint grows. There's not a lot of grazing land, not a lot of farming land around the operation. A lot more people coming into the area because of the added value of having a large mine in the area. So livelihood restoration is something that our CSR group are working hand-in-hand with the local communities on. We're looking at a 70-hectare irrigation program again for food, but also for income generation for the group. We need to expand that further into what will be a signature project for B2Gold in Mali. As soon as we get the strategy right for it, we'll be looking to expand into something more major again. Obviously, water. In a country which has 5 or 6 months of temperatures over 40 degrees, no rainfall. Water supply is key. One of the earlier things that we did in New Fadougou was obviously put in a system of wells and everything that could supply local community with water, and it's certainly part of our community development plans going forward is to provide water to each and every village. So we've beefed up the power supply to make sure that the water systems we install are more reliable and provide water when needed. And the other major issue in the area is the prevalence of small-scale mining. And I think most certainly, I know from Masbate's perspective, they have a significant small-scale miner issue. It's certainly prevalent around the Fekola operation. we need to work closely with government on formulating a plan on how to deal with that. It's not going to be an easy problem to cure, and that's going to take some out-of-the-box thoughts, which are probably going to have to come from ourselves rather than the government. The government really don't know how to deal with the problem. So we're putting committees together now to really work towards coming up with some solutions for what is a growing problem. And with more leases that we pick up, the bigger the problem is for B2Gold as a group. So there are our key sort of activities at the moment, not by any means the only things that we're up to, but just a snapshot of some of the things that we're doing and some of the things that we're looking at. So yes, thank you. That's all for Fekola at the moment. So I'd just like to welcome Mark Dawe, the country manager for Namibia.

Good afternoon, everybody. I'm here to talk about Namibia. Africa license [indiscernible] in Africa. None of the governmental problems that you've heard about in other places in Africa. We don't have issues as far as labor concerns, and it's really a wonderful country to live in and to operate in. So you probably heard from Bill that there's a number of exploration successes there. We have expanded our operations quite significantly. I think that would be a dream for B2Gold because you just don't hear problems for Namibia. So I think I'm going to start by saying that this presentation is not about the operations at all. Bill took that thunder from me. And he also trashed my presentation with all these CSI, Corporate Social Investment stuff and ESG stuff because I could get you here for a little bit too long. So thanks for that, Bill. So talk a bit about the people strategy because it always starts with people. What we've done is we've created an organizational, let's say, system or framework called Atushe Vamwe, which in Oshiwambo, [ Josh ], you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, means "We are one". That was created by our staff, the Oshiwambo-speaking people, the majority tribe. Namibia has a number of tribes and a number of people from different backgrounds, historical backgrounds, political backgrounds. And of course, you've also had the burden of apartheid and the difficulties we've experienced with racists in the past that we've had to get over. As you are probably aware, Namibia was part of South Africa's League of Nations Mandate, colony of South Africa. So we found that one of our important aspects we had to work on was to bring everybody together under one flag, the B2Gold flag. And with this, our HR department -- credit to my HR manager, actually developed this Atushe Vamwe program. And it centers around the 5 pillars really: develop, [indiscernible], grow the leaders, engage and recognize, build capabilities to support the company's strategy, and cultivate high performance, in line with the B2Gold philosophy. A little bit about our people. Once again, everything starts with people. One of the things that I'm very proud of when I took on the operations at the start of the operations just after the main part of the mine was built was we had a lot of expatriates. As you've heard from Bill and Clive, we build our own mines. And most of them just love living in Namibia, so they wanted to stay. And unfortunately, I had to say, I'm sorry, you got to go because we want to employ Namibians. So at this point, we actually have a 1% non-Namibians. We have a workforce of around just over 1,000 people, including contractors. Among those, the 1% of the non-Namibians, most of them -- 7 of them are actually [ immigrants ], so they're living there permanently. And we have 1 expat, and that 1 expat is our health and safety manager who happens to be a Canadian from Vancouver because he's really good at what he does, and we don't intend to replace him. So really proud of those statistics, and it just shows you that you can actually operate in a jurisdiction like Africa with almost 100% Africans, which we're very proud of. So we're going to look at a couple of our little CSI projects. These are our flagship projects. There are many, many more, as Ray said a little earlier. It was difficult to pick out a few, but luckily, I didn't have to do that because Bill did it for me. He trashed the other projects for me. Sometimes, I wonder why they pay me because I step back from the operations, it's going really well at the mine. And because I don't have trouble with the government at all, I spend a lot of my time, probably 70% to 80% on the social investment projects, environmental projects, conservation, that sort of thing. By the way, there's not a single conservation slide in here, which I was very disappointed about because you probably heard about the Rhino Gold Bar, 1,000 ounces was donated towards rhino conservation. But it's not about rhino conservation, it's about supporting the people conserving the rhinos. And there's not one slide in there, but I thought I'd just slip that in quickly. This is my favorite project of all. It's the Nakayale Academy for Orphans and Marginalized Children. It's a project right up in the north in the border of Angola. So around 1,000 kilometers from the capital, Windhoek. And it's a school that was set up by the Dirk Mudge Trust. In fact, the founding president, prior to the independence of Namibia, was a really very [ liberal ] guy, and he put whatever he could into the school. And that trust was essentially bankrupted by the prices of building the school for mainly orphans. And why are there so many orphans up [ Namibia ]? We obviously had a major HIV/AIDS pandemic some years ago. Namibia is actually -- it holds the record of being the best implementer of the PEPFAR program, President' Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, one of the very good things that George W. Bush II did. And the recipients of those programs are many up in the north of our country, but a lot of these children actually come from families where the parents have died or they could afford to be up in the north and then migrated to the cities. And so I was approached to look at this project and it became really of interest to me because it's the example of sustainability. It's supported by agriculture, a very large horticulture production up at Nakayale which we're now transferring to the mine itself. We've actually got 18,000 hectares of land around Otjikoto mine. And we've already established a proof of concept irrigation project. It's very large because we have a lot of water -- Namibia's a very dry country, [ we heard ], but we have a huge amount of ground water. And when we established that and the Board approved the establishment of the irrigation system to support food security and at the same time, generate money for our social projects. So that the dream is once the mine shuts down, we can continue to fund the social projects well after mine closure. And so this project is being supported by agriculture. We've just had our first graduate of the school, extremely high standard junior school. They've gone to a private school, high school, and we're looking at funding each one of the classes going to the high school as well. Unfortunately, there's a big disparity between the quality of schools, different areas, government schools and private schools. So we're trying to get them through some of the best schools. Another one of our flagship projects here. This is the Side by Side Early Intervention Center for children with disabilities. And it's absolutely amazing what we're able to do as a company in the township areas where parents cannot afford to look after these kids. And the parents can -- don't have the wherewithal or the ability to look after the kids, too. I'm going to flash through some of these, I could talk for ages about it. We're working with UNICEF on a program called UPSHIFT, which is -- it's essentially a program that tries to catch the children beyond early childhood development who are on their teenage years, so early adolescents, that fall through the cracks. So the early childhood development, first 1,000 days programs of UNICEF are very successful, but they realized, in fact, in Serbia, that these kids drop through the tracks and they had to do something with teenagers. This is a program that we introduced at B2Gold to UNICEF. We are actually the implementor for UNICEF through our education center at the Otjikoto Nature Reserve. So it teaches values to kids. Another project we're really proud of. Again, the income disparity causes education disparity in the country. And we find that a lot of the children in the [indiscernible] areas such as Bushmanland in the far east of Namibia receive such poor education that they never finish school. So a lot of the SAN community -- and by the way, SAN stands for Southern African Native. It's not a very respectful term. They prefer to be called Bushman. And maybe actually has the last remaining indigenous population of Bushman that still live as hunter-gatherers. And these kids are being forced to go to a school remote from where they grow up in the bush as hunter-gatherers, and they literally fail -- they're marginalized and ostracized by the, let's say, the more dominant tribes. And so the school very close to us actually came up with a very good idea to bring lessons across from their classes, mainly physics and science and mathematics. And for that, we needed to have a dedicated satellite link specifically for the project and smart boards where lessons would be given in the town of [indiscernible] by these very good private school teachers to the schools remotely initially, this one in Bushmanland. And within 1 year, we saw the pass rate go from being the lowest standard in the entire country, I think 186 out of 186 schools, to the top 3rd in the country in terms of what you would call in this country -- I think we call matriculants. I think you call it here -- what's the word that you use for school leaders? Graduates, whatever. And so we've now branched out all those calls, and I can read through them. And we just continue to buy more and more smart boards, and B2Gold is the main funder of this entire project. So it's really exciting to tell you more about it. Little Shop of Physics was actually started by Bill in 2014. It's from the Colorado State University. And it's a wonderful way of teaching physics and chemistry, and I guess, mathematics as well through practical experiments, through the application of experiments that everybody can do: magnetism, electricity and that sort of thing. So we set up a Little Shop of Physics center at our education center in our nature reserve, beautiful area, and it became so popular that it's now part of the national curriculum. It's being taught in every single school in the country. We've trained more than 400 teachers in our education center. And all physics and chemistry and mathematical teachers have to go through this program. So highly successful. We've also rolled it out in the south -- right down the south of the country, 2,000 kilometers, where all the diamond mines are, and it's been very well accepted. Another one of my favorite project is the Youth Orchestras of Namibia. So a lot of these kids in the marginalized areas have no opportunities. And as you probably know, Africans are extremely musical and naturally musical. And so we were approached by someone who's an opera singer, and she thought it would be really good to be able to teach these kids that otherwise don't have opportunities, the beauty of music. Because music is a great leveler. Everybody comes together with music. And the results of these -- of this opera school and orchestra school is -- the results are amazing. That's another one of our key projects under the title education, arts and culture. So recently, we brought arts. Thought it'd be really good to be able to bring culture into the education pillar. This is SME development. It's all about creating early stage entrepreneurs and, essentially, business incubation. It's been extremely successful. Also operated through our education center with a number of other partners. We're trying to promote partnerships because we want to make it sustainable so that if when we're not here, the programs don't just collapse then fall apart. And by the way, I'd like to mention here that our CSI, corporate social investment, corporate social responsibility, and the word investment is there because we like to think that we're investing in the country as opposed doing it by virtue of our responsibility in order to earn a social license to operate. And this particular program has been so successful with the partners that we operate. Moving to environment. That's probably our flagship environmental conservation project. [ Namibia ] is also a social pillar of this. We created that as B2Gold. We have -- those of you that know Namibia know that it's a very pristine, beautiful country with lots of nature and lots of wildlife everywhere. And there was the lack of a single umbrella body to coordinate the activities of a lot of these conservation organizations. And so they're pretty much disparate and all fighting for the same cash, [ donated ] cash that was not sustainable. So we created this. And of course, as is normal with B2Gold, you bring an idea to the Board and they say, "Wonderful. Get going". And this is what happened with the NCE. So to this day, we pay 100% of the fixed costs of all the staff members of the Namibian Chamber of Environment, and Namibian Chamber of Environment, I think, has 100% of all of the NGOs that work in the environmental and conservation sector, barring 1 or 2 that we don't want to have as members. And it is so successful. The social part of that program is dealing with the influx of people into these cities where there are informal squatter camp developments without any sanitation or hygiene. A lot of people would say, what's that got to do with the environment? It has everything to do with the environment because there's a huge amount of poverty and destruction of the natural habitat as a result of this movement and migration into the cities. And so we're putting in literally thousands of the teams and creating sanitation water points, and [indiscernible] from the informal developments, these semi-formalized developments that are affordable to a lot of the people, to marginalized people. And that's all I have time for. Thank you, everybody.

Good afternoon. I'll make a short update on mining in the Philippines. I'll be focusing on mining in general. As many of you may be aware, the Philippines is one of the most mineralized countries in the world. It has a long history of mining that dates back even before the Spaniards or Spanish came to the Philippines. In Masbate alone, Chinese were mining before the arrival of the Spanish. The Philippines is a demographic republic. It has a functioning executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. A stable mining law is in place, and we do have regular elections, democratic elections by popular vote regularly. In fact, we just had 1 last month, and the new administration will start its term in a week's time. The results of the elections are positive, at least from the mining perspective. The President-elect is Bongbong Marcos. He is the only son of former President Ferdinand Marcos. He won in a landslide. He openly supports mining, and he does recognize the importance of mining to our economy. Especially because of the pandemic, our economy, the Philippine economy is severely affected by it. We also have the incoming members of the cabinet who are pro mining, openly pro mining, and one of which the Secretary of Finance. He is the current governor of the Central Bank. He will be a co-chair of the mining industry coordinating council. He says that we need more investments in mining so that the country can benefit from its mineral resources. The open support for mining from the executive brands of the government is something that we didn't have in the previous administration. So we look forward to this. On top of the support of the executive brands of government, incoming administration to mining, we also have a number of positive developments in the mining industry. The first one is the lifting of the moratorium on the issuance of mining agreements. This had hampered the development of mines in the Philippines for about 9 years. So in April last year, finally, it was lifted. The second one is the lifting of the ban on open pit mining. This is a ban that was initiated by the late Secretary Gena Lopez. It lasted around 4 years. So now, open pit mining method is now allowed for new mining projects. The other 2 developments are company-specific, but I think the repercussions are good for the industry. The first one is the Didipio Mine of Oceana being able to renew its contract and being able to resume its operation. It had to shut down for 2 years before it got its renewed permit. The second one, which will be the fourth development, is on Tampakan project. Tampakan is one of the largest undeveloped copper gold deposits in the world. Each progress had been stalled by a local small-scale -- by a local open pit mining ban. But very recently, the governor of the province where Tampakan is located, he has recognized that the national law takes precedence over the local ban on open pit. So since Tampakan has acquired its permit from the national government, with or without the ban on open pit mining, it can proceed its development. In summary, I dare say that the Philippines is now more open to mining, and we do expect an incoming administration that will be more supportive, that will be more helpful. Thank you.

Thank you, Cris. I'm Dan Moore. I'm the GM at Masbate. Unfortunately, for you, you'll see a bunch of statistics. By training -- unfortunately for you, I'm an engineer by training. And much like finance guys, we like numbers. And just before I talk about the environmental and social aspects of the project, I won't be talking about the project other than that. I'd like to mention a couple of things about our people. So we've got a direct workforce of almost 1,000. Roughly of that staff that we have as part of that 1,000, about 1/3 are female as our department heads. We try to be very progressive. As Ray Mead mentioned, we do have some cultural issues that prevent us from hiring more ladies in the workforce, more women, but we do. We are very progressive, and we do hire as many as we can. And we really are very progressive. The Philippines is very good that way in a lot of ways, very progressive. Speaking of progressive, they're very supportive, very progressive in higher education, a fact that Cris Acosta can attest to. The Philippines' secondary and tertiary education are very keen on that. All of our superintendents and higher levels of college or university educated. In fact, 60% of the 1,000 employees we have, are college educated, very impressive numbers. We only have -- so all our employees, almost all of them except for 8 expats on site, are Filipinos. So we've got 8 of us, and they're very diverse. We've got a couple of guys from North America, a couple of Australians and 3 African guys and a fellow from the U.K. We are nonunion and we've attained that -- we've maintained that through an employee engagement committee. And that's something in the Philippines that allows a representative from every department to meet with senior management. So we meet periodically. They're able to raise grievances, concerns, suggestions, things like that. It's worked very well for us. And when I say award-winning, we've won the last 2 awards that have been granted, and that's among all industries within the Philippines. So there's like 100 applicants. So we're very proud of that. We also -- unlike some of the other operations, we do have a high number of contractors, and that's sort of a [ familiarity ] for the Philippines. So like our contracted workforce includes blasting, camp maintenance, camp support and security. I'll try to keep my presentation short. I know it's getting late in the meeting here. On the environmental side -- so I've got a couple of slides up. On the environmental side, we have rehab. We're very proud of our rehab approach. Our waste dumps, you may see other presentations or even on our website, we reclaim our waste stuff just as quickly as we can. And to date, we've reclaimed about 92 hectares, and we planted almost 400,000 trees, so 382,000, a pretty incredible number. Coral reef -- a couple of our keystone programs, coral restoration. So we're developing a coral reef outside of Masbate, outside of Aroroy, I should say, on the north end of the island. And to date, we've planted almost 40,000 coral on 2,200 artificial reef falls. So we construct these reef falls, that's actually a trademark term from an American company. We actually construct them on site anywhere from about 1 meter to 2 meters in diameter. We place those and then plant the coral on those. It's been very -- you can see some incredible photos, I think, on our website and other places. Mangrove reforestation, another keystone program for us. To date, that one, we've been doing for about 9 years, and we've reclaimed 300 hectares, and we planted 1.5 million-plus mangroves, so big numbers there. And those -- every one of those has been planted by local fisher folks, as they're termed in the Philippines, so local fisherman and fisherwomen. One thing we've changed within the last year or 2, we formed a number of university partnerships. It's actually a very, very good opportunity for us to tap into the expertise that exists in academia, marine biology, agroforestry, geochem assessment. We have people on site that have some exposure to those things, that have some expertise, but nothing like the universities have. And it really allows us to tap into that, and it works great for the universities and colleges, and it gives them a real-world application for it so they can send their students there to work at a mine even for their professors. Some of these professors haven't had a lot of exposure to the real world sometimes. So it works out very well. Very proud of these programs, and they worked out very well. On the social side, this is my last slide. So we do an awful lot on social, and this is a very, very small part of it, but it's a very important part of it. Since 2009, we've spent about $24 million just on CSR. For those of you that are familiar with Masbate, it's very close proximity to the community. So CSR is something we deal with every day, literally every day. So we're surrounded by communities Small-scale mining is a huge issue for us, and there's a number of other issues we deal with in the Philippines. But of the $24 million, roughly 25% has been in education and training. We've awarded well over 6,000 scholarships, about 2/3 of those to the high school level. A lot of those are new. So we're looking at coming up on 600 graduates from college. In addition to that, we support local instructors and then we have constructed day care centers to allow some of the nontraditional students to go to university or college classes. We've constructed 3 libraries and a laboratory. Training. Outside of that one, we say we've spent $1.2 million for training, that's in both largely vocational areas. So we have the traditional ones: plumbing, welding, bookkeeping, organic farming, tailoring, things like that. And the Philippines has a national certification available. To date, about 300 students have been able to attain that certification. Since then, we've been working very hard to help place students. That's one of the things that sometimes is the shortcoming in these programs. And particularly in the Philippines, is that they don't get a lot of help with placement. We're working very hard on that. We're working actually with other industries like shipbuilding and electronics manufacturing took place some of these students for both welders and people in electronics disciplines. That's something we've just done within the last year. We've also developed another program we call Digital Jobs, and it trains people for business outsourcing. So a lot of you know, when you get on a phone, you get the phone support in the Philippines. They're also -- Philippines is very big into that, obviously. And then for back-office things, for back-office work for accounting, they're very progressive there. And we're training people to get the computer skills to be able to support that. And that's all for me. I think Tom is up next with exploration. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Cris. So I'm just going to give you a bit of a short presentation on exploration. As Clive well knows, if I got going on all our projects, you'd probably want to have pills brought in. We would be here for a while. So I'm just going to talk about some of our highlights that we see so far this year in exploration. Right now, with the addition of the recent addition of $7 million, we're now spending $72 million in exploration around the world. Of that, $35 million is being spent in Mali alone. And obviously, that's where I'm going to focus most of my attention here. So in Mali, with the recent acquisition of the Bakolobi license, we now hold 25 kilometers along the Mali or Senegal-Mali sheer zone, which is one of the more prolific gold structures in the world. And we will -- very serious around exploring on the Bakolobi license. But what I want to do here is to show you what we see the future is. By the way, we recently acquired or we're in the process of acquiring Oklo, which is less than 25 kilometers away from the license, and it has some 670,000 ounces currently in the resource. And we view some pretty good upside there also. So on to -- and this slide's a bit embarrassing, but we started at Fekola around 4 million ounces in resources. With production of 2 million ounces in the current resources of around 10 million ounces, we're sitting at around 12 million ounces. And I'm going to try and show you that I still think we're early on in the exploration process. I think there's a lot more upside to this project, and my intention here today is to show you what that upside -- or some of that upside as we see it now and are already starting to show you. So we'll start with the -- you saw a slide earlier by Bill on the underground potential for Fekola. Now that potential is -- and I don't know if you can see it very well, but it's between the green line and the blue line, the bulk of that is between what we call our actual mineable pit or mining pit in our resource pit. And the underground is in that area in between. Now recent exploration that we've done in this area has shown some pretty significant intersections that are outside that current resource, numbers such as 5.7 grams over 7.6 meters, 3.3 grams over 28 meters, 4.9 grams over 19 meters, all well within what would be mineable underground numbers. So it is still early. And certainly, we're not going to be able to drill this whole area off to indicated from surfaces is a fair way down. And the final indicated numbers are going to come out when we're able to be underground and drill it. But what I'm showing you here is not only is this thing open down plunge, it's actually open underneath the underground -- the planned underground development, and it's open underneath the pit as you go back up towards surface. So there's significant upside in and around Fekola that we need to continue to develop and explore as time goes on. Next one is Cardinal. Now Cardinal is one of my favorites, not because I can sit here and brag about what great geological expertise we used to find this. It was in fact found during condemnation, which is now one of our new favorite exploration tools. We talk to our engineers where they want to put stuff and then we drill there and we find this. Pretty straightforward. I don't know why we didn't think about it earlier. But anyway, Cardinal, right now, we're sitting at around 1 million ounces or just over 1 million ounces in resource indicated and the inferred combined. But drilling below that resource, and specifically, if you look on the left side of that slide, you can see a hole down in the middle there. Hole 610, 2.7 grams over 21 meters, that's actually one of the better holes in the Cardinal area. In addition to that hole 594, which is, again, beyond the resource pit, we had 5.9 -- or sorry, 3.9 grams over 20 meters, both showing that at Cardinal alone where this accidental discovery still has quite a bit of potential to grow. And we -- unfortunately, with the amount of exploration we're doing up north this year, we won't get much done on it this year, but it does show just in and around Fekola itself, between the underground and Cardinal, there's significant potential. Now on to the Anaconda area, Bakolobi or Bantanko and the deal with the Menankoto license, Medinandi license. There is tremendous potential. This is where I see the big upside for Fekola. And you look at this resource, your current resource of just over -- actually 3.4 million ounces at over 1 gram. Interesting about that resource, by the way, at a higher cutoff of 0.6, you're still looking at just under 3 million ounces at 1.5 grams. So this shows that within these zones, there's some much higher grade material that can be -- because we're talking about being trucked down to Fekola or can support maybe some day after an open pit, some underground material. There were better grades there. But this is also interesting. We put out a release this morning that showed some holes in this area. And I'm going to talk to a couple of them. One of them, the King Brown area, or as we know it is the [indiscernible] area, which is another area where we've used the new exploration tool of condemnation drilling, we've been finding significant intersections in this area also, which is in between Anaconda and Mamba. So the area -- this is just grassroots drilling. So this area just in the grassroots drilling is starting to show upside. Now I'll go to Mamba itself. This is a slide that a lot of people have seen and we certainly have shown it for some time now. And if you look at this, this remains open down plunge and significantly down plunge. We just had a recent hole, hole 212, which is about 300 to 400 meters down plunge from our current resource, about 100 to 200 meters vertical. There's 2 intersections, that's why I've got this range. And it had 8 grams over 16 meters in the upper intersection, 2.69 grams over 19 meters. That's a pretty significant step up by anybody's business in the Mamba area itself. This is one of the zones within the Anaconda. So again, early on, in my opinion, despite the fact that we've had pretty significant resource, early on, and we're still getting good intersections well beyond our current resources. So as I said earlier, and I hope this helps to show that I think we're really early in this project. And I suspect that the resources are going to grow as time goes on. As I teased him last night or the other night, his son is going to be the project geologist there. His son's only, I don't know, 5 or 6 years old, your youngest son? He's a young boy anyway. And recently acquired the license in between Anaconda and Fekola called the Bakolobi license. And I really like this area. The reason I like it -- and actually, I shouldn't say I. We all like it, from the exploration group, is it's an area between the license where you go at Fekola, the Senegal-Mali sheer or mainly the main Fekola structure is a single structure with some structures coming into it. When you get up into the Anaconda area, we have 3 or 4 structures, all of which are gold bearing, and there's been some debate on which 1 is actually the Fekola structure. But when you get into the Bakolobi license, and this is what's from -- some geological license here, the Fekola structure bifurcates into several structures going north, and it bifurcates on Bakolobi license. That's key because those sort of areas are the areas structurally where you're going to find ore bodies. So to date, I forget the exact number, but we have a small resource on the Bakolobi license. And you can see the 2 areas on the right-hand side of this slide. This is where the license is on the left-hand side of the slide because the south of Anaconda is a large area covered with laterite, which is the same sort of area that under Anaconda where we started to find the saprolite resource. So we think there's tremendous potential. We know that Anaconda is opened. Anaconda are open to the south. They've been open into the Bakolobi license. So there's another area of extremely good exploration potential. So like I said, I could talk for hours on some of these things, but I'm just trying to give you a bit of a teaser of why we think and believe strongly that it's still very early on in the -- what's Peter's term?

Fekola complex.

Fekola complex. It's still very early on in the Fekola complex. And one thing I'd like to have said, and I've said it a few times with our group, and it's an embarrassment of riches. This is going to be around for a long time, and it's going to be a backbone, a significant part of B2gold exploration for some time. So one of the other things -- one of the other exciting things that has happened this year, we all know that Otjikoto has been producing for some while. And we've had some success in the Wolfshag area, which we're mining underground. We had success to the east of Wolfshag in a small area. But this year is the first year we've actually seen something that we think is significant. Now if you look at this, and I realize it's a hard slide to read, but in the middle is a blue line that goes along. We know that the Otjikoto zone -- and Otjikoto plunges to the south. And the mineralization actually continues beyond what is open pit-able. Now some of the areas of grades have not been good enough for underground, but there are some areas that are. What we did this year, and credit to the guys on site, they drilled some holes 2 and 4 kilometers south of the Otjikoto pit. And what they found is actually now that the -- as you get that first up the Otjikoto zone is starting to come back up towards surface. And so it's all of a sudden opened up a huge area of exploration potential. And not only that, if it does come up back to surface, we're doing surface work right now, it bodes very, very well for the future there. And yes, I can't read it. Sorry. The intersections are significant enough and we'll be there for some time exploring from it. Now moving on, the other one we're very excited about, and certainly, our joint venture partner, Aurion, who's at 70-30 JV ore operator here, has been excited about -- and we're certainly very excited about this increment. Now the license we have with our joint venture partners is adjacent to the Rupert discovery. The structure that the Rupert discovery is on extended some -- these are 14 kilometers all the way to -- yes, about 14 kilometers long to what we -- this one, we drilled a few years back called Kutuvuoma, which we've had some success at. Well, this year, or late last year and this year, we've been drilling about 1,400 meters of strike along an area that's on our side of license. Within that, we have about 800 meters of strike length of significant mineralization. And we're starting to get an understanding of this. It's going to -- it seems to have a gentle plunge to the west. It seems to have several zones along it. In some of the intersections we've got, hole 22018 had 2 zones -- or sorry, 1 zone: 2 grams over 77 meters, including 4 grams over 24 meters. That's in the heart of it's pipe-shaped body. And then hole 29 -- 22029, we have 2.6 grams over 50 meters. So we're starting to see very significant mineralization with good thicknesses in this area. And so we're excited about the future of this. So thank you, everybody. That's all I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of the exciting things we're seeing, and I hope you've got in your mind Fekola. This is going to be here for a long time and for us in terms of potential. Thank you.

Well, that's pretty clear. I'm sure, as you can see from the presentation today about our commitment to leading the places that we work in better shape when we're gone with all these incremental programs we're doing. You can also see, I think, why we're pretty excited about the growth potential of the company, with some of the things that Tom's outlined in exploration and some of the opportunities that Bill was talking about as well. It's time to wrap up and thank you for your patience. It's been a likely lengthy, but I think we really wanted to present to you some of these -- what your company is all about and the kind of things that drive us in terms of how we conduct our business. We're very proud of what we've done. We're just as proud of how we've done it and the way we've done all these programs you see, and many, many more that we didn't have time to talk about today. Just some thank yous to wrap up. So I thank our Board of Directors, a very good, diverse strong Board of Directors. Unfortunately, Bob Cross couldn't be with us today, or Kevin Bullock and Bongani Mtshisi were not able to attend today but I want to thank them for their support as well. The executive team, you've met some of them. It's just a honor to work with you guys. We've always been about team for since we started this journey a long, long time ago. And I'm just proud to be involved with such an incredible group of professionals. We all have a similar culture, and that culture, I think, proud to say is p the entire -- our world, treating people with fairness in respect to transparency. Also, all of our employees. We have an incredible team here in Vancouver. Many people who have been with us for a very long time. Our turnover is extraordinarily low worldwide, which I think speaks again to the culture. We have amazing employees, some of the management you've met from some of the countries around the world. They're an incredible group. I still enjoy going to sites, recently in Namibia, and seeing these local people wearing their proud -- proudly wearing the B2Gold [ folding ]. Also people that help us make this all happen in addition to all of our employees, the governments and the countries where you work, the local communities. Both of our lawyers and auditors and consultants and advisers play a very important role. And our brokers and bankers, we have a great, strong syndicate of bankers. And I also want to thank, of course, again, the shareholders who allow us to go around the world and extend the culture, which is an extension, I believe, of the Canadian culture around the world. So thank you to our shareholders for their support over a number of years. We do have -- we're adding in terms of looking as we grow, to adding strength -- more strength and capability within our management team. We do have a few changes that are happening now. Roger Richer on my left as our Senior VP of Legal. And Roger's an incredibly talented individual I've had the pleasure to work with for 40 years-plus. [indiscernible] 40 years-plus. I know you're thinking we are victims of child labor. But no, it was -- we're a little older than that. But I just want to say on behalf of the employees, Roger is retiring at the end of this month after a very, very successful -- long and successful career with us, he's going to stay involved because everybody would like him to, in an advisory capacity to draw on his incredible experience and his knowledge of this industry, much more than just the legal side of things, that's for sure. So Roger has been a great friend and a teammate, and we've had some incredible ventures around the world from Russia to Southern Africa and lots of places in between. So I just want to thank Roger on behalf of everyone for his contribution. And I know it will be ongoing as well. So Roger, thank you very, very much. Just as that, we've got some additions to the executive team. Vic King who's over here, has been promoted to Vice President of Exploration, working with Tom and the group. Peter Montano is here, and he's been promoted to Vice President of Projects, a very strong mining engineer. And Raphael Wagner, who's been promoted to the position of Vice President of West Africa. Raphael was our lawyer working for us for quite a long time with a law firm in Paris, and he joined the company full time. And now, he's promoted to this very important leadership role within the company. So I just want to thank you all for your time and your attention. We're going to have some beverages out on the back here. Please join us if you can. And you can see why we're pretty proud of what we've done in 2021. I'm very excited about the future for B2Gold. So thank you for your time and attention. Thank you. Sorry, I'm supposed to open up for questions. I'm sorry. You can ask us now or you can ask us over beverage, if there's questions here, if there's anything I can answer. Okay. It's been a long meeting, so we're available. We're all available to answer any questions you have. We're also available for people online to send us some questions through Randall. Randall's also been -- is taking Roger's position as the Senior VP, Legal and also Corporate Communications. So another excellent addition to the team. We've worked together for a very long time. He's now sort of been in this exciting new position. So thank you again.