Thanks, Tim. Thanks, everyone, for coming this morning. A big thanks to the Diggers and Dealers Mining Forum team for having us back. I see the numbers are dwindling out there as the wounded soldiers make their way in after a few nights in the Palace, probably day three. It's always tough. It always feels good waking up without a hangover, which is unusual for me. I think this is a bit of a conspiracy that put Richard on day three to keep him sober for the week. We always drive up from Perth to Kalgoorlie. Lyndon and I reminisce on the way up, and I guess I was reminiscing, but this is our ninth speaking slot at Diggers and Dealers since we made our discovery at M1 South.
It's our 15th consecutive Diggers and Dealers, which is quite an achievement and probably getting up there towards 20 for me, given I did a few beforehand. I was getting to this presentation, some forward-looking statements. In 2016, I just thought I'd have a bit of a snapshot. What's the share price? Any guess? Anyone can guess out here? Oh, steady on, dammit. It was $0.26. Market cap, $110 million. We had $11 million cash in the bank. As I look here today, we're at $2.7 billion market cap. It's probably a little bit higher today because the market likes annual update, which is very nice. Thank you. $328 million in cash and gold. Looking back in 2016, our best drill result for that year was 18 meters at 83 grams per tonne with a meter at 1,000. That was the M1 South discovery.
I overheard someone talking at breakfast this morning about how they don't bother looking at explorers. It's the biggest mistake I think any investor can make, overlooking exploration because, you know, you're not going to get a 10x return on an established miner, but you will on an explorer. That's been demonstrated by West African Resources share price going from $0.26 to about $2.60 in 10 years. Just on our guidance for this year, we just ramped up, or we're ramping up our second mine, Kiaka, in Burkina Faso. We acquired that project from B2Gold in 2021. We're trending towards guidance in production. We're just trying to get the grid power on at Kiaka. The project came in early and the grid power's on time. We expect to have that grid power on in the September quarter, and then we can let rip in Q4 this year.
We've updated resources and reserves. After mining depletion from last year, we've still got 12.2 million ounces in resources, 6.5 million ounces in reserves. That's increased after depletion. We've had a nice bump at M1 South with infill drilling. Our new 10-year plan is going to produce 4.8 million ounces, and there's a number of years where we'll be over 500,000 ounces production per annum. That's based 83% on reserves. We're still exploring, and I still think there's more potential. I think by March next year, we'll be able to increase that 10-year production target significantly as we aim to be a sustainable half a million ounce a year producer. Of course, this can't be done by one person. We've got a wonderful team at West African Resources, and this is just the tip of the iceberg with our board and executive team.
I believe we're the best mine builders in the world now, bringing our second project in under budget ahead of schedule. We're also up there in operators as well. We've had four years of either meeting or beating guidance since we started operating in 2020, and we've done it in a pretty challenging jurisdiction. Burkina Faso has not been easy. We acquired Kiaka in 2021. There were two coups in 2022, yet the team, which I led, managed to fund and build Kiaka ahead of schedule, which I think is a remarkable achievement. What we've done here is tied up about 120 strike km of really prospective greenstone belts and structures. What we're going to do for the next 12 months is focus on this and really try and extract the most value we can out of our existing assets.
Today's announcement shows that we've got potential to get over 500,000 ounces by 2029, and we've done that through targeted drilling programs at M1 South, the M5 South underground, which we're drilling at the moment, and also extending the pit to the north of M5, which I'll show you some isometric pictures in a minute. We're also doing it through bringing in more underground, which I think we're seeing across the world at the moment with gold mining projects. We're also looking to add secondary crushing into Sanbrado and into Kiaka to maintain high throughputs. By putting secondary crushing into Sanbrado, we should be able to maintain over 3 million tons per annum of hard rock processing. We'll wait and see how we go with Kiaka because the mills are very, very hungry.
We've already punched them up to 10 million tons per annum of throughput for some short periods of time already. Currently, that project's running at about 50% throughput, and that's about 18,000 tons-2 0,000 tons a day of throughput. The potential there is enormous. We've assumed some fairly conservative metrics, and we think by adding secondary crushing into Kiaka, we can maintain 10 million tons per annum for the life of mine from 2028. This is our new production target. This year, we're looking to produce about 300,000 ounces, with about 200,000 coming from Sanbrado and about 100,000 ounces coming from Kiaka. Kiaka is still ramping up. We really won't expect Kiaka to hit its straps until Q4 or Q1 next year. You can see in 2029, we've got our peak production of nearly 570,000 ounces.
The back end of this schedule, I think we can get it up over 500,000 ounces consistently by more drilling. That's what we're going to do. Here's a lovely shot of Sanbrado at night. This project's been in operation since 2020. We came in six months ahead of schedule and $20 million under budget when we built that one. Sanbrado is a cracking mine. It's a mix of open pit and underground. It's got about 11 years mine life left. One thing we don't do is under drill. We've got our own fleet of drills that we operate, and we're not going to die wandering. We've got about 200,000 meters of drilling being done this year and next year with our own rigs on our projects. Sanbrado production peaking just over 300,000 ounces in 2029 as well.
The back end of that schedule is where I pointed out I think we can make some improvements. The engine room of our project, or the deposit that actually helped build Kiaka, is M1 South, and it's an absolute ripper. Some of the recent drilling results that we put out from our infill drilling at depth: 44 meters at 25, 44 at 17, 38 at 17, 21 at 24. It's a very, very strong, robust ore body. Really good to mine. It's got great recoveries. Lots of visible gold. It's a very attractive ore body when you're underground. You can actually see it. We've got about 12,000 meters of resource extension drilling planned for the second half of this year. We'll step over onto the main lode back in 2027 as well. This is a kind of isometric of the Sanbrado complex.
You can see that we've got open pit, underground. We've got an exploration drive, which we punched across from M1 South to M5. We're currently drilling the deepest holes at the moment. We're taking a punt, seeing as we run by geologists. We know the geology's been quite consistent. We've got very strong vertical continuity. We've been bullish and we've drilled the deepest holes first. We're looking forward to releasing those over the second half of this year. Just in our long section view, you can see where on the left-hand side of the screen, our targeted program for the deeper mineralisation of M5 South, which will bring into the underground plan next year. That's where I think we've got a lot of potential because currently we've only got about three and a half years of underground feed coming from that part of the project.
The rest of the strike, which is another two kilometers of strike, has been lightly drilled. To bear in mind, when we made the discovery at M1 South in 2016, we shifted all the rigs across to the high-grade chute. We really haven't done a lot of drilling at M5 since 2016-2017. We've got a very big program going at the moment with our own rigs. Tooega, we brought into the mine plan as well this year. That's got an underground potential. It's about 600,000 ounces, roughly, in open pit. We'll transition to underground after that. We're bringing in the secondary crushing when the underground feed starts coming out of Tooega in 2029. The lovely Kiaka at nighttime. These are the biggest mills that have been put into West Africa in a long time. There's about 27 megawatts of milling capacity. The mills are over 40 ft . They're very big.
Cyclone underflow pumps are taller than me. It's a big project. It's very hard to get the scale of it just from a photo. It's been a really good build, good support from our suppliers and contractors. Like I mentioned before, the last sort of piece of the puzzle for Kiaka is just to get the grid on. We expect that to be imminent. It's an 18-year project, producing about 250,000 ounces per annum. Like I said, we're ramping up at the moment. We'll ramp up for the rest of the quarter and really hit it in Q4. That's what the site looks like now. It's still a bit wet, but it was a blank canvas in November 2022 and a completed site there in July 2025. First gold at Kiaka was poured in June, just a few weeks ago. The project's ramping up nicely, 92% recoveries at the moment.
We're mining with our own mining fleet about 40,000 tons a day and currently processing about 18,000 to 20,000 tons a day until we get the grid on. We've maintained our guidance. I think if we have a good quarter in Q4, we can still get over 100,000 ounces for the calendar year. What we've had to do in Burkina Faso, because of making it difficult for international companies to work there, and often they don't want to work there because of the perceived security risks, we've just taken on mining ourselves. Over the last 18 months, we've sourced and trained our mining team. We've acquired a fleet from Caterpillar of trucks, so 785 trucks. We've got 14 trucks on site. We've got another 12 777 trucks coming into Sanbrado, and they'll start arriving this quarter. We've gone with top quality equipment.
The fleet's Caterpillar, the diggers are Caterpillar, rock drills are Sandvik. We're spending good money on good quality equipment because we know we'll get the utilization out of them. That's from the Nimba opening day. We're the first big deal for the new Caterpillar dealer in Burkina Faso, and they've given us some good terms on finance for the Sanbrado project as well. Our community, when we operate in Africa, it's a tangible opportunity because if we relocate people, we're actually dealing with people who are on the project. Our focus really is to provide employment as number one, which means we've got to provide education and training. We also are very focused on health. We build a number of hospitals in the region. Most importantly, we pay our taxes and royalties.
We've contributed over $350 million to the Burkina Faso economy since we started operations in 2020, which is really significant. We've invested over $8 million in community projects around our operations. Nearly $20 million has been contributed into the local development fund as well. With our people, nearly 3,000 people are employed by the company now across the whole group. We've got 90 interns on site at the moment across our projects. Over 6,000 hours of training has been provided with inductions. I can say genuinely that we're an indigenous employer with 93% of our workforce coming from Burkina Faso. Out of that 93%, about 60% of those are our senior positions on site, Burkinabe people. Protecting our workforce is very important. We've already built a track record for being a very safe company. Over 11 million hours worked in the last 12 months. We've had 15 reportable injuries.
Currently, our trajectory is trending well below the West Australian average, which is remarkable and a great achievement from our safety teams. We've got dedicated teams on site for Health and Safety and for our ERT team. We actually brought our ERT team to Perth last year for the MERC mining awards, the emergency games in Perth. We came fourth overall. We beat some of the bigger companies like Rio Tinto and FMG and some of their teams, which was remarkable. We actually won a number of the challenges, which was really good. We've also built medical centers at both of our projects. Just in summary, we're a quality team. We like to under-promise and over-deliver. We've had four years now of meeting or beating guidance. We've not hedged the company. I think that's been one of the best things that we've done.
We've managed to fund our projects without hedging and without giving away royalties to financiers as well. 6.5 million ounces of unhedged gold reserves and over 12 million ounces of unhedged resources. Like I said, with our social programs, we are integrated into our communities. We're always working on our social license to operate. Our environmental and social programs are aligned with international standards. We've got very strong cash flow. I'm not a mathematician, but we'll be on track for nearly 500,000 ounces next year. At the current gold price, we're close to $2,000 an ounce U.S. margin. You can do the math on that. We've always worked on drilling our projects out to maximize the longevity of our projects. That means we've worked on our 10-year plan every year for the last sort of five years. We'll continue to do that.
I think we'll have another 10-year plan out in March next year, which will be a significant improvement on this year as well, given we can fill in the back end with more drilling at M1 South and at Toega Underground. We've got about 200,000 meters of drilling going over the next two years. We're aiming to be or to maintain a sustainable 500,000 ounce production from 2029. Thank you.