Thank you, Nathan, and thanks to our shareholders for dialing in this morning to listen to the summary of our quarterly activities for March 2021. First of all, on behalf of the Board and shareholders, I'd like to extend our thanks to the site team who continue to do a magnificent job in challenging circumstances, in particular our fly and fly out expats and some of our people are coming up for 5 stints in quarantine, which is a real challenge. And given that the executive team has recently been on-site, so myself, Lindon Hopkins, our Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director, Padrego Donahue, our CFO, Stew Cruickshanks, our GN Tech Services, we're all actually sitting in hotel quarantine here in Perth. We've just been to site and we're just finishing our 1st week and we're looking forward to getting out next week. So this is mostly for myself and Stu and Padraig.
It's 2 or 3 times. I think Lyndon's done at least 4 stints in quarantine in the last 12 months. So it's certainly something we're managing, but it is challenging. So the good thing about doing the trip was there's a great chance to see the operations that have changed in the last 12 months. So really pleased to see the progress with open pits, the underground and also see some of our social initiatives like schools, hospitals and some of the community programs that we've been rolling out over the last year.
On a positive note, also, it was good to see our national hiring policy improving. Our training programs are paying off. And our operating entity in Burkina Faso, Samisa, currently has more than 90% indigenous employment. So people from the local area and from other regions in Burkina Faso, just over 20% of our workforce is female as well. So that's a really positive note.
So also while we're in Burkina, we managed to hold some really positive meetings with delegates from the government of Burkina Faso from various departments of mines, finance and tax. Really positive meetings are buoyed by the government support for the projects of the company. Moving on to health, safety and environment. So during the quarter, we had no significant social health or safety incidents. We now worked more than 6,000,000 hours without an LTI and our TRIFR is currently less than the West Australian average.
So that's a great credit to the team on-site. We've maintained continuous mining and milling operations during the quarter. We still see COVID as a significant risk. Obviously, everyone's watching what's going on in India and other parts of the world. Further disruptions with international travel, I think, are likely.
And given that we've just been through it, we kind of understand that intimately. And look, the measures that we've implemented, we expect to sort of continue for the foreseeable future. And that includes following safety guidelines, health and safety guidelines with social distancing, temperature checking, testing before you leave Australia, testing when you arrive in Burkina Faso, testing before you leave Burkina Faso. So there's a lot of structure around that, and we'll continue doing that in the foreseeable future. Just on production, we've had another solid quarter with ounces up and costs down.
Q1, we produced nearly 56,000 ounces of gold at all standing costs have been reduced from US992 dollars an ounce last quarter to US957 dollars an ounce this quarter. We averaged US1800 dollars per ounce in unhedged gold sales. And we're currently tracking really well against the production plan and guidance that we released in March. So we're on track to meet the range of 2000000 to 280000 ounces of gold produced at US720 dollars to US800 dollars an ounce. Moving on to the underground.
Mine ounces were about 30% below the previous quarter and ore tonnes were down about 7%. Ore grade was down as well against the previous quarter. We're still actually picking up quite a bit of mineralization from outside the mine plan, so which we're taking the opportunity to mine when we're actually there. During the quarter, we completed 802 meters of underground development versus 510 in the previous quarter. And at the end of the quarter, the decline was 315 meters below surface.
So as you can see from the numbers, during the quarter, our production cycle moved from stoping to backfilling and development. And what we're really doing is setting up the rest of 2021 to focus on stoping activity. So we're putting in that development and hard work now. That will be paying off throughout 2021. On open pits, mine ounces were down on previous quarter by 5% with a higher ship ratio.
However, that's generally due to mine in the M1 South open pit. This resulted in a 35% increase in grades. So the grades lifted from 1.3 grams in Q4 last year to 1.9 grams in Q1 this year. On processing, the process continued a solid performance as it has done since we started up last year. And as mentioned earlier, gold produced was just under 56,000 ounces with a 10% increase in head grade to 2.3 grams per tonne last quarter compared to 2.1 grams per tonne in Q1 Q4 last year.
Recoveries are steady as well at 94%, and mill throughput was in line with the last quarter. Just running through the financial and corporate review. We finished the quarter with CAD94 1,000,000 cash on hand. We had CAD39 1,000,000 generated in cash from operating activities. And we finished the quarter with about AUD 31,000,000 in unsold $1,000,000,000 And that's just due to timing of gold shipments, which was a bit higher than what we had last quarter.
We also made our 1st scheduled debt repayment to Taurus of US13 $1,000,000 And we also made an additional US25 $1,000,000 debt repayment just after the end of the quarter, reducing the tourist loan balance to US137 $1,000,000 So we basically paid down US38 $1,000,000 in debt in 1 quarter, which is quite an achievement. At the end of the quarter, notional debt decreased by US25 $1,000,000 to US76 $1,000,000 So we're making good progress on that front as well. Moving on to growth. So during the quarter, we released our updated resources reserves production guidance and a 10 year production outlook. Resources ticked over 5,000,000 ounces 5,100,000 ounces at 2 grams, which is a great outcome for the company.
That's with the addition of Tuwiga and extensions of M1 South. Ore reserves, there were no real change in ore reserves except for depletion. And we expect that by the end of this year, we'll be bringing 2 acre into ore reserves and also portions of the M1 South underground. So we expect that to lift. We also provided guidance for production for 2021, which I mentioned earlier.
And we also provided a 10 year production outlook of over 216,000 ounces from average production from 2021 to 2,030. So that's a significant improvement on our previous life of mine plan. And I just got investors to have a look at the announcement we made on the 9th March, which is lodged on the ASX and on our website if anyone needs any further detail on that. We've been progressing to Eiga during the quarter as well. So feasibility studies are ongoing and permitting work is well in hand.
We completed geotechnical drilling and samples for geotech and met test work samples were made ready for shipping and they'll be shipped very soon from Burkina back to Perth. We're currently infill drilling at Tooega, and we expect to finish that drilling by the end of this quarter. On other exploration, we have been doing some auger drilling programs in the west of Burkina at the Kamo project. We've also got an auger rig at the MV3 or V3 permit, which is just to the west of San Brado. And we've also completed the historical data review over V3.
And it turns out there has been some historical drilling on that permit with some RC drilling returning 16 meters at 5 grams beneath workings. So we'll be following those up with RC drilling later this year once we finish all the auger work and mapping. We expect to finish the auger programs in Q3, and then we should be in a position to go through the data and work on target definition for next field season. So just moving on to our objectives for next quarter. We're obviously focusing on delivering the guidance, so increasing gold production and reducing per ounce costs.
We want to finish the drilling at Tawiga, which will be infill drilling, which is the plan to increase resource category and convert resources into reserves. And we'll crack on with the organic drilling campaigns around San Brato and Kamawi. That's the sort of high level coverage for the quarter, and I'll pass back to Nathan for any questions. Thank you.
Thanks, Richard. If you would like to ask a question, please enter it into the Q and A panel within Zoom. Your first question comes from Roger Fitzpatrick from Charlton Family Office. There's 2 questions. The first one is when can shareholders expect to be paid a dividend?
Or will you be concentrating on paying back the debt?
Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Roger, for your question. Certainly, our focus this year is to pay down the debt. You can see we've just made a pretty big inroad into it this quarter with $38,000,000 paid back since our last quarter. And that's reduced our overall debt down to US137 million dollars Later this year, we'll, I guess, focus on what we do for next year, and that's whether we pay dividend or whether we buy back shares.
And that will be something we're considering. This year, we focus on obviously on debt repayment. And I think if the gold price stays around where it is, we should have the debt cleared with tourists. We're seeing that we should be net cash by the end of the year and have the loan paid off in Q1 next year. Thanks.
And the second question, what is the exploration budget for the company this year? And where will it be spent?
The exploration budget so far for 2021 is about US12.5 million dollars Most of that's being spent on the Tuwiga feasibility study. And we're obviously very focused on converting the inferred resource at Tooelego into a higher category and then getting reserves into our mine plan. And the life of mine plan that we put out in March includes some inferred resources. So our focus is delivering that and converting inferred into indicated and measured categories. Like I said, we've got 2 augur rigs operating at the moment.
We have so one near MV3, which is very close to San Brato. We've got one out at Kamoe, which is working on a new grassroots project. So Kamoe is a collection of about 3 or 4 permits. It's in a really good location in a nice geological setting. And we look forward to sort of releasing some results in that load this year.
And then we've also got some exploration to do around San Prado, which we will be moving on to after we finish the infill drilling at Towaga. So that's the current focus. We think there's really quite a high probability of adding ounces from the surrounding area around San Brado in addition to sort of organic growth from our early stage of grassroots exploration programs. Thanks, Nathan.
Thank you. So your next two questions come from Mike Milliken at Urals Hartley. So the first one is regarding M1 South underground grades. And he's asked regarding the M1 South underground grades, should be tracking in the Cow, are they going to be tracking in the current quarters, I. E.
Any additional ores outside the mine plan, mix between stope and development ores and results from any reconciliations?
Right. Thanks. So the last quarter, we were just under 8 grams per tonne for the average grade. That might include a lot of development ore and also some hanging wall zones outside the mine plan. What we found is that there's some areas that are kind of hard to define from grade control drilling.
And when we've been doing the longitudinal board drives, which the first three levels of the underground mine have seen that we've had to go and chase some of these zones with sludge drilling after the ore dry development. So that did kind of flow us up a little bit with the overall sequencing of stoping and backfilling. But the part of the ore body that we've been mining to date has been in the southern end and also these sort of hanging wall zones. We're moving into the main part of the ore body now, which is the 2nd panel, which is closer to the core of the mineralization. So we expect kind of growth to improve from here.
Like I said earlier on, the quarter in this quarter, we focused a lot on development, really setting ourselves up for big 2 quarters the final 2 quarters of this year, which we're almost entirely in stoping ore. So the development that we're putting in now is between the 2,070 and 1995. So surface level is 2,300 and we've got generally 25 meter levels from the 2,170 down to 19 95, which have been developed. And if investors remember our exploration story, we hit a lot of high grade mineralization not long after we made the discovery. And most of those results have actually come from that 2,070 to 1995 level.
And that's where the ore body kind of joins back together and we've got one solid pipe. So that's where we've got transverse development. So we're going across the ore body and that's something that I've seen just recently when I was on-site. So that looks very good. So we expect rates to pick up.
We don't see any issues around the life of mine grade. So I think that kind of covers that question off. And we expect the bulk of the tonnes to come from stoping in the back end of this year, and we've still got a bit to do this quarter. But we're going back into a stoping cycle by the end of Q2.
Stuart Dodd from Renaissance also asked a question about the underground and reconciliation that I'll I think you've covered it there. So the last one from Mike is when should we expect your results from Tooega and there's timing for the resource update?
Right. So we can expect some results from 2 regulators this quarter, and we'll be releasing those into late in the quarter into Q3. We will update the resources in line with our annual resource reserve update, which we'll be working on late this year and then releasing in January sorry, January 22.
Thanks, Richard. There's no further questions at this time. So I'll hand back to you for closing remarks.
Thanks, Nathan. Look, thanks to our shareholders again and thanks to our site team for doing a good job. We look forward to keeping investors updated with progress throughout the quarter. And that's about it. Thanks very much.