Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold, and it is 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. Anita Bassi of Computershare Investor Services 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 my left, Senior Vice President of Exploration, and Dennis Stansbury on his left, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Project Evaluations. Bill Lytle on the far end on my right, Senior Vice President of Operations and Chief Operating Officer. Randall Chatwin, who's Senior Vice President of Legal and Corporate Communications. Dale Craig, Vice President of Operations and Country Manager, 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 of 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 16th, 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 noticed by 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 out 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 at 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. May I remind you that only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or username will be able to see it 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 to 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 open 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 has 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 report and will be posted on our SEDAR profile. I now declare the polls open on all resolutions, including the circular. The first item of business is a 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 Quinn 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 .
Speak in the mic. Roger, can you lower the mic?
I am a registered shareholder, and I move that the number of directors be set at nine.
Are there any questions or discussions on the motion? If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that the 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? The next item of business is the election of directors. The nine 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 advance notice policy. Accordingly, management nominates for election. Nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have nominations for management proposed directors.
Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as directors: Clive Johnson, Robert Cross, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, Terry Johnson, Robin Weisman, and Liane Kelly.
I would ask for a motion that the nine directors nominated 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 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? The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, chartered accountants. Management proposes that it be reappointed until the next annual general meeting. May 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? The next item of business is to consider and, if deemed advisable, pass the resolution on a non-binding 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 shareholders vote for the resolution on a non-binding 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 non-binding 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 discussions, I direct the poll be conducted on the motion 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? 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 gonna read that one again. That concludes the 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.
The polls on all such resolutions are now closed. I direct the scrutineer to provide a report on the results of the polls.
Right here, Mark.
Thanks. I got it. Do I read these out?
You can if you wanna. They've all passed.
I now have the preliminary results for the matters set forth on the circular. Based on these preliminary results, I declare that the number of directors of the company be set at nine, as the majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated. The nine 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. The resolution on a non-binding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been carried.
After the meeting, upon receipt of the final scrutineer's 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 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, you know, 75% approximately of the shares were voted this year. That's an extraordinarily 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. That's the formal part of the presentation. Now I'm gonna 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, look, forward-looking and therefore may be subject to change. A lot of you know quite a bit about B2Gold, I'm sure. We're gonna talk a little bit today about our projects, both of mines and production, our development projects and 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 three producing mines, the Fekola Mine in Mali, the Otjikoto Mine in Namibia, and the Masbate Mine in the Philippines. We also have exploration development projects in a number of countries in the world rather, including Finland, Uzbekistan, Colombia. Our commitment has always been to be driven more by geology and opportunity than geography.
As you've seen, we've had 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, the federal governments to ensure that we could 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. I found it very rewarding that the governments in the countries we worked, our employees, including our unions and our local communities, we all had one thing in common.
We wanted to keep mining as long as we could do it safely. 'Cause these revenues from mining and jobs are absolutely critical in the economy of these countries. 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. When we got together and discussed COVID with each of our operations, we had tremendous support from community employees, management, and the governments. I think it's really a direct result of earning their trust. The way you earn people's trust is by treating them with fairness, respect, and transparency. Really one of the most important aspects of that is delivering on the promises you make in all the locations in which you work.
I wanna 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 as an industry leader in low cost production. All 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. We also maintained a very strong financial position and liquidity, and we continued to pay an industry-leading dividend of $0.16 a share on an annualized basis.
We paid a quarterly dividend, and it's the highest dividend yield at 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 and continued to develop our development projects and had some great results in exploration. In all, it was a tremendous year of performance and I'm not gonna steal everyone's thunder here, so you're gonna 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 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 would think today some own it for the dividend, but also I think they own it because we're a growth company. You know, 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 and 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 since 2012, starting off with the mines in Nicaragua, the Libertad and El Limon mines, and then the Masbate Mine in the Philippines, which we acquired the mine from a smaller company. We did improve it dramatically and brought it down to a much lower cost producer. Of course, we went to Namibia for the Otjikoto Mine, which we successfully built on under budget, ahead of schedule. 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. That's one of the keys to our success, is that delivering on the promises made. That's why we have our own construction team.
That's why we want all of our employees, as many as possible, to be direct B2Gold employees. 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 work in. 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. We're receiving the full compensation that we intend to get to them by having them as direct employees. I think it builds an incredible trust and a spirit of the family that is B2Gold. I think that's one of the keys to our success. Here we are now with projecting a little over 1 million ounces of gold production again for next year.
The breakdown of production for 2021 was 567,000 ounces from Fekola, 188,000 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. Endeavour's done a very good job in West Africa. We're second here with operating cash flow growth from 2017 to 2022 of 36.7%, 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. You know, when we built the...
We acquired the Fekola Mine by taking over a successful Australian company called Papillon. It was quite controversial 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. Shareholders were pretty frustrated and pretty disappointed with the performance. I remember people saying, "Well, 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 were very good at what we did, and we were gonna continue to grow the company irrespective of some of the critics who questioned whether we could do it or not.
Because we didn't want to dilute our shareholders, and in 2016, B2Gold hit a low of CAD 0.80 a share as people doubted we could finance the project. We financed the project with debt, with a syndicate of excellent banks that Mike and his financial team put together. Those are banks that have been very loyal to us for a number of years, partly because we delivered on the promises that we made to the banks as well. Because of that, we didn't dilute our shareholders when the stock was trading at its, 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 equipment leases. That's some of the reason 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 2017, we were still in the construction modes. It was -$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. A lovely place to be when we look at further growth and further development. Dividend yield, I talked about this already. You can see us against some of our peers.
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.
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. If you look back to January of 2009, we were just over CAD 1 a share. If you look from there until where we are today, at around CAD 5 a share, just under CAD 5 a share, that's a 961% increase if you bought the shares back in January of 2009. Now, as you can see from this chart, we hit highs of very close to CAD 10 in 2020.
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 $2000 an ounce mark. 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 $2000 and going much higher. There was a sell-off in the gold, across the gold index, gold shares. We got hit a little harder, and we've recovered some of that. We got hit a little harder, and let's be frank about it's because in part of the perception of political risk.
For us, we've been prepared to go where others fear to tread around the world, believing that some of the best opportunities are there. Plus, we didn't wanna play the competitive game of trying to buy projects in established areas where people felt very comfortable investing, because there's a lot more competition when you're doing that. Our success is partly based on our willingness to go where others fear to tread 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. We went to the far east of Russia in 1998 to build a gold mine when gold was $300 an ounce at the time.
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. We've been able to dramatically grow and see these extraordinary financial results. We get penalized to some extent because of the perception of political risk. I wanna talk a little bit about that, and I know you're gonna hear a little bit more about Mali today. Mali is the topic that we get the most often about concerns about political risk. 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 have reasonable taxation levels and have. It's 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 try and buy these development projects. We've had a long history of extremely disciplined acquisitions, including the Bema days and B2Gold. It's quite simple, really. We'll never acquire a project or a company that has the development projects that we like.
We'll never acquire in those types of opportunities needing the gold price to go higher or finding more gold, needing those two things to justify the purchase price. That's our strategy. When I say it to people, I expect someone's gonna say, "Well, duh. Doesn't everybody do that?" 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. We take that very disciplined approach. To buy gold stock, in my opinion, a producing gold company, gold price going higher or exploration 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 higher or justify our share price.
At the end of the day, I talk to lots of generalist funds who aren't gold investors, and I say to them, "You should look at B2Gold because of our incredible performance, our highest standards in the industry of ESG, safety for our people, and look at our profitability." If gold's $1,850 or $1,830, and we're producing gold today at around $1,000 an ounce, all-in sustaining costs, there's a pretty serious profit margin there without, especially particularly, without having any corporate debt. I tell them, "Just pretend we're producing widgets." If we can produce widgets for $1,000 a widget and sell them at $1,850 a widget, that's pretty damn good business. We're not as perhaps obsessed or driven by the gold prices some other companies are.
Some of them are because their costs are a lot higher. 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. That discipline has been a big part of what we've done. 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 stock's basically half of that level. The gold price has only gone from touching $2,000 to down to around $1,700 now, about $1,830 as we speak today.
It is somewhat confusing to some extent. The problem in part, I'm not an expert, but what I see in the sector and the investment world, there's very nervous times right now, and there's a bit of a liquidity crisis. In a liquidity crisis, people sell everything, sometimes including gold and sometimes their gold shares. We have a lot of nervous investors out there who are sometimes looking for reasons to buy shares and sometimes looking for excuses not to. We have to continue to tell those people that the excuses, because we're in Mali or other places, listen to us. Don't judge us by other people's success or failure. Don't judge us because of the countries we're in.
Look at how 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 to achieve this incredible accomplishment. That's the message to the shareholders. You know, 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. We haven't been that out of pace, but it is obviously, disappointing to see this. I'm extremely confident we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing. You're gonna hear today about some dramatic growth opportunities. One of the ones we're, a couple we're very excited about is looking at terrific expansion for Fekola, which you'll hear a little bit about.
We appreciate the shareholder support and the patience. Enjoy the dividend. It'll continue. I do think we're gonna see a recovery in the gold sector overall. 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 'cause it's maintained a very solid gold price, and when many other things, Bitcoin and other things, are getting hammered. 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. It's nice not to have to bet on that. At the end of the day, we are highly leveraged to gold.
For every $100 gold goes up, there's another approximately $100 million of profits, gross profits to this company. Yes, we're highly leveraged to gold, but we're performing extremely well without having to see gold higher. Just a little, just a couple of minutes more from me. The corporate strategy, we're gonna 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. While you're growing really rapidly, sometimes a few things may fall a little bit behind. I'm so pleased to see in our case that they didn't fall behind at all.
We were able to grow dramatically, including during COVID, and we were still able to maintain the highest, some of the highest standards in our industry. We're very proud of that. We're gonna continue to maximize profit and 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 'cause we planned that what if we find more gold? Let's make sure we're building a mill, that we can expand the mill relatively cheaply to accommodate that. You'll hear a bit more about that. That's been an incredible success story. We started off as, well, producing 300,000 ounces a year, Fekola, and we've now been up to 600,000 ounces a year. Continue to maximize the three mines, the production from the three mines.
We're also gonna continue to have 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, can if you have a lot of arm waving involved, in fact, they may never very often be mined. There's justifiably some suspicion around inferred resources. 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. When you look at 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. We're gonna continue that, and we're gonna continue an aggressive exploration program. I think Tom's budget this year is around $65 million. He's gonna talk about that. Exploration is a key to our success and always has been. The cheapest ounces will always be the ones you find. We found a lot of them. Yes, we do accretive acquisitions and it seems to find more gold, which is the bonus, but we're also very good at finding it. 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 of 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 when you're in that stage, you do take risks. I call them measured risks. Whether it's geology, whether it's geography, these are measured risks. Unfortunately, most big gold producers are not very good at exploration. It's the juniors normally who are hungrier. Who generates the projects that the bigger companies take over and build into mines. 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. Tom understood very early on in our careers the importance of economic geology. That for me to go out and raise money to continue what we were 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 theory. 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, in all the things you expect of a disciplined, responsible gold producer. We still have that entrepreneurial flair and that spirit. We will still go where others fear to tread, and that's where some of the best opportunities come from. Continue focusing on development pipeline. You'll hear a bit more about that.
We're gonna talk quite a bit about 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've said, being very disciplined about that. We're gonna continue to do that, but it's harder now because our 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. 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 versus acquisitions because I like the growth profile we have.
Our shares are clearly undervalued, as I think there's 14 mining analysts 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 Canadian share, and here we are trading at just under CAD 5. There's belief in that in the sector as well, which is one of the reasons I'm encouraged that we're gonna see our share price recover as we carry on going forward. M&A is also difficult because you need willing partners to do it. You need people to do what we did in Bema when Kinross came and 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 into for years. We did the responsible thing. As directors of the company and executives, our job is to build value for shareholders. It's a fiduciary and legal duty, actually. Unfortunately, in the sector today, and we've seen it for some time, we see a number of managements or directors from 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. They should take it to their shareholders. I strongly disagree with that, and we walk 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 wanna stay with the management, the company that's there? Do you wanna consider being taken over on a friendly basis at good value by a bigger company? That 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, yet I find many people who are public, I mean, leaders of public companies often call shareholders and brokers and bankers and pretty much everybody else necessary evils.
Well, part of the reason I guess why we respect our shareholders and our bankers and brokers and everyone that we deal with is because we started in exploration a couple of times. It was really tough. I had to go run around the world trying to raise money for exploration projects that weren't always popular. That way you build partnerships with people who help you raise the money. I've never considered shareholders or consultants or all the other people that we work with, bankers and brokers, as necessary evil. Far from it. They're one of the reasons we succeeded. I think that's perhaps an important distinction that we all in public companies need to continue to remind ourselves, how did we get here, and who do we work for?
I'm gonna leave it there for now, and I'm gonna ask Mike Cinnamond to come up and talk a little about our financial position today. I'll be back.
All right. Thank you, Clive. Although Clive said he wasn't gonna steal anyone's thunder, he already told you all the good bits about the financials, so.
I'll try and fill in and try not to repeat myself too much and fill in some of the detail. Also wanna say just before I start, it's great to see everybody here and welcome to those of you who are shareholders, like, there are quite a few folks. It's the United Nations of B2Gold here in the room today. You can see folks from all around the world, so hope you get a chance to catch up and meet them. So I'm gonna 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 always a powerhouse mine in Mali. Fekola, it's benefiting just from the throughput at the mill. A mill that we budgeted for the year to do 7.75 million tons per annum did by the end of the year was doing 9 million or more. 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, 223,000 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 better recoveries and more ounces.
In fact, we did so well against budget, we were actually able to take some unscheduled time and do some mill maintenance there because we were so far ahead of schedule. Then Otjikoto annual record. I'm 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 costs $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, the higher production. That was offset. We're seeing inflation and some inflation in costs near the end of last year, 2021, and stronger local currencies. When we take that into account, those were pushed up, and we still came in within our guidance range. Same story for the all-in sustaining costs, $888 per ounce sold.
It's at the lower end of our guidance range, $870-$910, and that it just mirrors the performance that we saw on the cash operating cost side. Couple of general comments about inflation. It's definitely a current topic. I'll talk a little bit more 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. One of our main costs that impacts all our operations is fuel. We're seeing inflation in fuel costs just like all other mining operations. So just to give you a little bit of insight, we're trying to protect ourselves against that in a couple 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 $50 million, where it was gonna benefit us by $50 million versus current costs. By the end of the first quarter this year, that was worth $30 million. It just gives you an idea of how much fuel is going up and therefore how much the hedge book is gonna help us a bit as we go through the current year. The other thing we did in fuel was 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.
They're basically a way of trying to permanently reduce your costs, your fuel costs, and it probably saves us somewhere around 17%-18% of our mill energy costs by producing that through solar. Great program that we have, great CSR program and also great economic program. Gold revenues for 2021, $1.8 billion. We realized just under $1,800 an ounce. 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 gonna 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 raising rates to combat inflation and therefore impact gold. Who knows what's right and how to interpret them? The good news is, I think, for gold, is that everyone's worried about something, and so far that seems to be benefiting the price. 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. Any impact and benefit of the gold price flows straight through to our bottom line. Cash flow from operating activities, just $724 million.
Proud to say that we got that completely wrong when we forecast it, but we got that wrong in a good way. We had reforecast $650 million for last year, and we came in at $724 million. That's a great result. Couple of factors in there, but 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. Tax payments still high. We're a big contributor to the tax coffers of the countries that we operate in, and in 2021, our total tax payments in cash were $340 million. Big contributions to each of the countries where we produce. Now I'm gonna just comment on 2022 guidance, just a few thoughts.
Gold production, it's in the middle of our. It's roughly a million ounce mid-range that we give. Pretty similar to the current year. Close to those 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 develop it in. Strong for production for 2022, again, led by Fekola. We did budget 9 million tons for the year production, our throughput, now that we see the mill operating as well as it is.
That's reflected in our guidance for 2022. Would say production, like all the factors here, costs and cash flows, production is definitely weighted half one versus half two. 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. That impacts the cost profiles for the first half, for the second half and also the cash flows. Cash operating costs budgeted $620-$660. Again, it's a bit higher than last year. It's probably $120 an ounce higher than 2021. 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. 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 costs range just somewhere north of a mil or $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 forecast or given guidance, cash flows for $625 million for the year. That's based on $1,800 gold. 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 next slide, this is just a brief snapshot of how we did in the first quarter of 2022. 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. It's just excellent performance. All three mines were above budget for the Q. If you look at the cash operating costs there, $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 two quarters of the year are forecast to be much higher than the second half because of the weighting of production. 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 we are experiencing.
What we did see was fuel costs in Mali for the Q were actually lower than we thought we'd be. They're set in advance there by the government, and we saw some time lag there between the higher fuel costs actually flowing through. We saw the benefit of it in our results. It was offset by higher costs for fuel at the other two operations, but net, we came in under budget on the cost side. All-in sustaining costs at $1,036 per ounce, same story. Looks a little higher than compared to the range, but again, it's supposed to be higher still for the budget.
We 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.
In our view, although we do see cost inflation, we still think with higher production and that we're seeing and with where we are, that we'll come in within our cost guidance ranges, so we didn't re-guide. The final comment. Oh, Randall told me there's only two 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 is just on liquidity. Again, Clive touched on this pretty ably. 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 features, 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's described. We are also in good shape, if we want to do anything more on the M&As, 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 wanted to use the cash flows from our operations and just some transferable 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. It's a good place to be, and it's an easy story to tell. Thank you. With that, I'll pass it on to Bill.
Bill, there's only two buttons. You can do it.
Oh.
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 gonna happen. Operations were declaring force majeure and shutting down. What I will 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.
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. 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. On top of that, we're in jurisdictions where, one, the employees are not necessarily used to this kind of heavy mechanized equipment. Day in and day out, we're really kind of stressing, having to stress the importance of health and safety.
Two, where we work, rightfully so, the government's always asking us to nationalize the workforce to try and bring as many of the locals into the management team as possible. You have to imagine the challenge where you're keeping people longer on site. You're promoting people that may not have the 20-30 years experience, and then you're telling everybody, "We want you to be safe." It really is a tribute to the management teams all around the world, and quite frankly, in the corporate office where we've kinda 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 three 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 in, we couldn't get people in." Maybe, you know, the first coup in Mali that now suddenly we've got a problem there. Can we deal with the government? 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 kinda catch the guys in Africa to make sure there's no issues. The first thing I always do is kind of half with one eye open scroll through the emails.
For a while there, I was kind of afraid to see what was gonna come up, right? Because it may be, "Oh, here. Oh, wait, there's another coup in Mali. Oh, wait, now there's sanctions in Mali." But it's a tribute to the management. Just humor me a second. I remember when I was a younger engineer and I'd had a good year for B2, and Clive actually at this meeting called me out by name. For me, it was, like, really kind of life-changing. "Oh, he recognized me." I do wanna call out, like, the GM and the president from Masbate. There's Dan Moore and Cris Acosta, and then Ray Mead for Mali, Fekola.
Currently, we have a management team in Mali, so I do wanna call them out. Ibrahim Touré and Birama Cissé right here. Issa Diarra and Namory Keita and our legal there, Dalada Bally didn't get to come. In Namibia, we've got Mark Dawe as the managing director and Eric Barnard. I saw him over here somewhere. You know, all of these people really are the keys to what we do. I get to stand up here and say how great we are, but they're the people in the trenches really doing the work. I appreciate what you're doing. What you can see, they've already talked about this. We continue to grow. We had another record production year, and we're gonna talk about ESG here in a bit, after ex.
I think before exploration. 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. 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 these just real quick. I think everyone's aware. The Gramalote project, which is in Colombia, Dale Craig is managing that. We inherited a feasibility study that we were or the 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 wanna build it. 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. 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 to B2 standards.
The guys on the ground made a tough decision, a very tough decision to, in the middle of development, to pull that contractor and move in a different direction. 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 ton per annum mill. Was expanded during construction to 5 million tons. Was operating at 6.5 million-7 million. We expanded it again for limited capital. Once again, thanks to John Rajala, our VP of Metallurgy. Now we're currently sitting at 9 million tons per annum.
That's important as we talk about how are we gonna continue to increase our growth profile. We've also started in 2021 looking at an underground, right? Basically, the Fekola deposit has eight consecutive pits leading further in depth. We started looking at what happens after that eighth phase when we get into the inferred resource. 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's aware of the Anaconda area, which is 20 km 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. 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. What I will tell you is that we have absolutely seen some very positive reductions in capital costs, which we had hoped for. Of course, as I think everyone's aware, with the global inflation, we're gonna get some of that back. We'll see where that comes out. Certainly, by the end of Q3, we'll be ready to talk about it. 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. They're looking very good now, and we're very happy with how that's progressing. As I said, the Fekola Mine, we ramped up to 9 million tons per annum. 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. Actually, maybe not the best thing to do. 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.
We're now talking about, as I said, 9 million tons per annum with up to 15% of saprolite. The Anaconda area, they updated the mineral resource. If you look at now. Just look at those numbers there, the indicated and inferred, you're now talking at 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. 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 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, kinda that green circle, that's the Fekola pit. 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 in one, that it gives us 25 linear kilometers of contiguous strike along the Fekola deposit. 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 wanna build another mill. We're gonna develop in 2022 three projects.
Okay, the first project is what we're calling the Phase One Anaconda Project. The Phase One Anaconda Project is a trucking study. It looks at if we were gonna go to Bantako North or Menankoto South or a combination of the two 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? 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. We've got those four licenses there, but we also are in the process of acquiring Oklo Resources, which is to the east of these licenses. What that gives us is a bit of a regional play, right? We're talking about a second mill. We're talking about where we're trucking material from. What the sequence is.
We've gone back to Lycopodium, 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, the Fekola District. 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 eight phases of open pit. We're currently working in phases six and seven. We looked at what would happen after that and what we've done, I'll talk about a little bit more, is we looked at the underground resource and can we build a mine, an underground mine to 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. This just quickly points out all of the different resources that we have. I'm not gonna go through all these kinda 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. That's what we use to develop our underground. The interesting ones is if you look at the Anaconda in conjunction, that's where you get the 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? 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. What it showed is that you should put this thing into development as quick as possible. Remember, it's still an inferred resource. Our plan currently is that we would develop the access to it where we can drill it off underground. So the
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. That's really it. Like I say, from my side, I'm very proud of everything that everyone's 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.
To introduce.
Now I'll turn it over to Ibrahim Touré and Ray Mead from Mali.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Very honored to be here representing Mali and talking a little bit about the political situation prevails in Mali. Situation is pretty complex, right? There's a lot of things being said, but you know, we're trying to explain a little bit. As Clive so nicely put it's all about the perceptions, right? The situation is pretty complex. Mali went through a multidimensional crisis in the past few years or so. 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 transparent and constructive relationship with all the stakeholders. This is at the national level.
I mean, at the local level with the communities 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. We have developed and established a long-lasting relationship where B2Gold is recognized as a key player in the mining sector in Mali today. That is very, very exemplary and very important to us in terms of what we are achieving currently in Mali. During all this period, right? The current authorities that are in place there, that have been in power since 2020 following a coup. Of course, everybody's aware of that.
There was a coup in 2020, and then some few young military took over power. You have to understand that there's a lot of positive 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. People have requested for a change, and these young military leaders came in and brought that change. Ever since, there are palpable, tangible actions that are being undertaken that are really, I would say, somehow constructive and solidifying investment in Mali. You can already see in terms of government, there's already lots of positive results there.
You know, 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 parts of Mali, which are the stronghold 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. Lots of positive things to be credited to the current authorities. 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 free election.
Until then, they will be in power. As of now, everything is going very well. They have started working on the independent organization that will organize the election. All of this is with a strong support from the population who feels really comfortable with this young leadership that have been established. They have shown that they are doing a great job. As I said, they have given a calendar of 24 months with about 14 months left now. This has created a bit of tension with ECOWAS. ECOWAS is the regional institution in charge of political and economic development of West Africa, or the body that are overseeing this whole process.
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. The Malian authorities felt like a year was too short, so that's why they decided and announced that it will be a two-year process. ECOWAS hasn't agreed to that yet, but there are some negotiations underway. Hopefully on July 3rd, in a few days, there will be a new summit held in Mali, and hopefully they'll come to an agreement. All of this has created some diplomatic row with some nations, especially France, which is the traditional colonial power in Mali.
All of this, the position of the new authorities, which is kind of different from all other traditional government that we had, both you know to take matters into their own hand and trying to show that in Mali we're capable of achieving certain things, especially in the security front. This has, I would say, opened to new partnerships with new countries such as Russia, such as Turkey and other nations of the Middle East. That wasn't really appreciated by the traditional colonial power of France. It has created some tensions, and you see it on the media and everything that is happening. In reality, this is to the benefit of the country, we believe.
It can be felt today that we're taking our destiny into our own hands, that things are moving quickly. There are new bilateral cooperation with Guinea and Mauritania because ECOWAS, Mali is a landlocked country, and ECOWAS nations surround the country. With them having the border closed and everything, it was an issue to get some of the products. I will talk about that in the next slide. 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 a lot of nations. What are all of these really means for us as a mining company?
You know, I just wanna share a few points with you. The fact that most investment, mining investment or FDI, foreign direct investment in general, that took place in the country, all went without any interruption, any stoppage in the production. In all of this, you have to understand, I think, Clive and both Mike mentioned that the importance of the mining industry in the overall economy. Like in Mali, the mining sector represents 10% of the GDP, and 70% of all export products, and 25% of all taxes collected by the government. It's a key sector.
In just a few years, you know, we saw in the graph earlier from Bill, when B2Gold came into play by 2016, in just few years, we have positioned ourself already as one of the key operator in Mali. That is well-recognized. Today we produce about 1/3 of the country's gold. 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 being 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. These 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. You know, I have so much to say about this political situation. It's fascinating. In all, the most important is for us to maintain this strong relationship with the key stakeholders. Of course, we have that Canadian DNA in our culture, which is, you know, our guiding principle of fairness, transparency, and respect. This is showcased every day in our approach, and it's very, very well-received by the countrymen.
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 initiative, 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 two 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. At the same time, we've constructed a 3 MW 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. Through the last couple of years, we've managed to commission this plant.
To date, it has outstripped original feasibility numbers. To date, we've produced 16.7% of our power from that solar power source. The actual real annualized rate is somewhere around 21%-22%. 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. 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's actually meant is we've actually picked up an extra 1,000 employees during a pandemic. 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 like. In an impoverished African setting like we are, health is not highly regarded and certainly not well catered for around us. Any contribution we've been able to have in that setting, certainly by stopping anything COVID-related from expanding outside our borders, has been certainly well regarded by community around us.
We've actually set up the only privately run COVID lab in the state of Mali. 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 the community perspective to find employment for. We've done what we can, where we can, and tried 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 onto the mine site. Takes a lot of effort as long as 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 levels possible. Mining in Mali has also been in a position of growth right across the board.
Again, we've had to make sure our training can keep up with some turnover 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, has been of significant interest from the government. They garner a lot of income from the mines. 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 gonna be with the performance of the operation in the country. 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 just shows 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 that along 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.
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's shown in his maps, our footprint is rapidly expanding. It is growing just in towards the end of last year 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.
Now, with what we've seen now and 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 impoverished villages around the operation, particularly on a healthcare front. 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 Fadougou 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. We're now actively doing it for the last nine-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. 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. 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. 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 five or six 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. It's certainly part of our community development plans going forward, is to provide water to each and every village. We've beefed up the power supply to make sure that the water systems we install are more reliable and provide water when needed. The other major issue in the area is the prevalence of small-scale mining. 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 it's gonna take some out-of-the-box thoughts, which are probably gonna have to come from ourselves rather than the government. The government really don't know how to deal with the problem. We're putting committees together now to really work towards coming up with some solutions for what is a growing problem. And with the more leases that we pick up, the bigger the problem is for B2Gold as a group. They're 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. Yeah. Thank you. That's all for Fekola at the moment. I'd just like to welcome Mark Dawe, the country manager for Namibia.
Good job. Thanks, very good job.
Hi, good afternoon, everybody. I'm here to talk about Namibia. Africa Lite as they know it 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 concerned, and it's really a wonderful country to live in and to operate in. You probably heard from Bill that there's a number of exploration successes there. We're hoping to expand our operations quite significantly. I think that would be a dream for B2Gold because you just don't hear of problems from Namibia. I think I'm going to start by saying it's 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 keep you here for a little bit too long. Thanks for that, Bill. To 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 Otjiwamwe, which in Otjiwamwe, Joshua, you will correct me if I'm wrong here, means we are one. That was created by our staff, the Otjiwamwe-speaking people, the majority tribe. Namibia has a number of tribes and a number of people from different backgrounds, historical backgrounds, political backgrounds.
Of course, you've also had the burden of apartheid and the difficulties that we've experienced with racism in the past that we've had to get over. As you are probably aware, Namibia was part of South Africa. It was under the United Nations mandate, a colony of South Africa. We found that one of our important aspects we had to work on was to bring everybody together under one flag, the B2Gold flag. With this, our HR department, credit to my HR manager, actually, developed this Otjiwamwe program. It centers around the pillars, five pillars really, develop the desired company culture, grow the leaders, engage and recognize, build capabilities to support the company 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 that we had a lot of expatriates. You know, as you've heard from Bill and Clive, we built our own mines. Most of them just loved living in Namibia, so they wanted to stay. Unfortunately, I had to say, "I'm sorry, you gotta go because we want to employ Namibians." At this point, we actually have 1% non-Namibians. We have a workforce of around just over 1,000 people, including contractors. Among those, the 1% that are non-Namibians, most of them, this is obvious, seven of them are actually permanent residents, so living in Namibia permanently.
We have one expat, and that one expat is our health and safety manager, and he happens to be a Canadian from Vancouver because he's really good at what he does and we don't intend to replace him. Very 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. 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 all the other projects. Sometimes I wonder why they pay me because I step back from the operations.
It's going really well at the mine. Because I don't have trouble with the government at all, I spend a lot of my time, probably 70%-80%, on 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 by. Because you probably heard about the Rhino Gold Bar, 1,000 ounces that was donated towards rhino conservation. It's not about rhino conservation. It's about supporting the people conserving the rhinos. 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 Marginalised Children. It's a project right up in the north on the border of Angola.
It's around 1,000 kilometers from the capital, Windhoek. It's a school that was set up by the Dirk Mudge Trust. It's in fact the founding president prior to the independence of Namibia and was a very liberal guy. He put whatever he could into the school. That trust was essentially bankrupted by the process of building this school for mainly orphans. Why are there so many orphans up in that area? We obviously had a major HIV/AIDS pandemic some years ago. Namibia actually holds the record of being the best implementer of the PEPFAR program, President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. One of the very good things that George W. Bush II did.
The recipients of those programs are mainly up in the north of our country. A lot of these children actually come from families where the parents have died or they couldn't afford to be up in the north and they migrated to the cities. I was approached to look at this project and it became really of interest to me because it's an example of sustainability. It's supported by agriculture, a very large horticulture production up at Nakayale, which we're now busy 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. Very large because we have a lot of water. Namibia is a very dry country, very arid, but we have a huge amount of groundwater.
When we established that, the board approved the establishment of an irrigation system to support food security and at the same time generate money for our social projects. That the dream is once the mine shuts down, we can continue to fund the social projects well after mine closure. This project is being supported by agriculture. We've just had our first graduates leave the school. Extremely high standard. Junior school have 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. 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. The parents don't have the wherewithal or the ability to look after the kids, too. I'm gonna 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 in their early teenage years, early adolescence that fall through the cracks.
The early childhood development, first 1,000 days programs of UNICEF are very successful, but then they realized, in fact, in Serbia that, these kids dropped through the cracks and they had to do something as teenagers. This is a program that we introduced as B2Gold to UNICEF. We are actually the implementer for UNICEF through our education center at the Otjikoto Nature Reserve. It teaches values to the kids. Another project we're really proud of, again, the income disparity causes education disparity in the country. We find that a lot of the children in the very remote areas, such as Bushmanland, in the far east of Namibia, receive such poor education that they never finish school. 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 Bushmen. Namibia actually hosts the last remaining indigenous population of Bushmen that still live as hunter-gatherers. These kids are being forced to go to a school remote from where they grow up in the bush as hunter-gatherers. They literally fail, they're marginalized and they're ostracized by the, let's say, more dominant tribes. A school very close to us actually came up with a very good idea to beam lessons across from their classes, mainly physics and science and mathematics.
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 Outjo by these very good private school teachers to the schools remotely, initially this one in Bushmanland. Within one 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 third in the country in terms of the, what you would call in this country, I think, we call matriculants. I think you call them here, what's the word?
Graduates.
That you use for school leavers.
Graduates.
Graduates, whatever. We've now branched out into all those schools, and I can read through them, and we just continue to buy more and more smart boards. B2Gold is the main funder of this entire project, so it's extremely exciting. Love 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. We set up a Little Shop of Physics center at our education center in our nature reserve, beautiful area. 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. All physics and chemistry and mathematics teachers have to go through this program. Highly successful. We've also rolled it out in the south, right down the south of country, 2,000 kilometers where all the diamond mines are, and it's been very well-accepted here. Another one of my favorite projects is the Youth Orchestras of Namibia. A lot of these kids in the marginalized areas have no opportunities. As you probably know, Africa is extremely musical and naturally musical.
We were approached by somebody 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 the great leveler. Everybody comes together with music. The results of this opera school and orchestra school are amazing. It's another one of our key projects. They're under the title Education, Arts and Culture. Recently we brought Archie, thought that it would 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 try to promote partnerships because we want to make it sustainable, so that if one day we're not here, the programs don't just collapse. They don't fall apart. By the way, I'd like to mention here that our CSI, corporate social investment, that's corporate social responsibility, and the word investment is there because we like to think that we're investing in the country as opposed to doing it by virtue of our responsibility in order to earn a social license to operate. This particular program has been fabulously successful with the partners that we operate. Namibian Chamber of Environment, that's probably our flagship environmental conservation project, although there is also a social pillar to 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. There was a lack of a single umbrella body to coordinate the activities of a lot of these conservation organizations. They're pretty much disparate and all fighting for the same cash, donor cash that was not sustainable. We created this and of course, as is normal with B2Gold, you bring an idea to the board and they say, "Wonderful, get going." This is what happened with the NCE. To this day, we pay 100% of the fixed costs of all the staff members of the Namibian Chamber of Environment.
The Namibian Chamber of Environment, I think, has 100% of all of the NGOs that work in the environmental and conservation sector, barring one or two that we don't want to have as members. It has sadly successful. The social part of that program is dealing with the influx of people into the cities, where there are informal squatter camp developments without any sanitation or hygiene. A lot of people would say, "Well, 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.
We're putting in literally thousands of latrines and creating sanitation water points and we're moving from the informal developments to semi-formalized developments that are affordable to a lot of the people, marginalized people. 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 democratic 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 one 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 incoming members of the cabinet who are pro-mining, openly pro-mining, and one of which is 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 branch of the government is something that we didn't have in the previous two administration, so we look forward to this.
On top of the support of the executive branch 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 nine years. 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 Gina Lopez. It lasted around four years. Now open pit mining method is allowed for new mining projects. The other two developments are company specific, but I think the repercussions are good for the industry.
The first one is the deep mine of OceanaGold being able to renew its contract and being able to resume its operation. It had to shut down for two years before it got its renewed permit. The second one, which will be the port development, is on Tampakan Project. Tampakan is one of the largest undeveloped copper gold deposits in the world. Its progress had been stalled by a local open pit mining ban. Very recently, the governor of the province where Tampakan is located has recognized that the national law takes precedence over the local ban on open pit. 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. Dan Moore, I'm the GM at Masbate. Unfortunately for 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. 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. We've got a direct workforce of almost 1,000. Roughly, of that staff that we have, as part of that 1,000, about a third are female, as are 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. Fact that Cris Acosta can attest to, the Philippines secondary, tertiary education, they're very keen on that. All of our superintendents in higher levels are college or university educated. In fact, 60% of the 1,000 employees we have are college educated, but very impressive numbers. All our employees, almost all of them, except for eight expats on site, are Filipinos. We've got eight of us, and they're very diverse.
We've got a couple of guys from North America, a couple Australians, and three African guys, and a fellow from the U.K. We are non-union, and we've attained that. We maintain 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. We meet periodically. They're able to raise grievances, concerns, suggestions, things like that. It's worked very well for us. When I say award-winning, we've won the last two awards that have been granted, and that's among all industries within the Philippines. There's like 100 applicants. 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 peculiarity for the Philippines.
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, I only got a couple of slides left. On the environmental side, we have rehab. We're very proud of our rehab approach. Our waste dumps, so you may see other presentations or even on our website. We reclaim our waste dumps just as quickly as we can. To date, we've reclaimed about 92 hectares, and we planted almost 400,000 trees, so 382,000. Pretty incredible number. Coral reef, a couple of our keystone programs, coral reef restoration.
We're developing a coral reef outside of Masbate, outside of Aroroy, I should say, on the north end of the island. To date, we've planted almost 40,000 coral on 2,200 artificial reef balls. We construct these reef balls. That's actually a trademarked term from an American company. We actually construct them on-site. They're anywhere from about a meter to two meters in diameter. We place those and then plant the coral on those. 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 nine years, and we've reclaimed 300 hectares, and we planted 1.5 million plus mangroves. Big numbers there.
Those, every one of those has been planted by local fisherfolks, as they're termed in the Philippines, so local fishermen and fisherwomen. One thing we've changed within the last year or two, we formed a number of university partnerships. It's actually a very good opportunity for us to tap into the expertise that exists in academia, marine biology, agroforestry, geochemical assessment. We have people on site that have some exposure to those things and have some expertise, but nothing like the universities have. It really allows us to tap into that. It works great for the universities and colleges, and then 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. It works out very well. Very proud of these programs, and they've worked out very well. On the social side, this is my last slide. 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. 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.
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 daycare centers to allow, you know, some of the non-traditional students to go to university or college classes. We've constructed three libraries and a laboratory. Training outside of that one, we say we've spent $1.2 million for training. That's largely vocational areas. So we have the traditional ones, plumbing, welding, bookkeeping, organic farming, tailoring, things like that. The Philippines has national certification available.
To date, about 300 students have been able to obtain that certification. Since then, we've been working very hard to help place students. That's one of the things that sometimes is a 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 to 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. A lot of you know, when you get on a phone, you get phone support in the Philippines. They're also. Philippines is very big into that, obviously.
For back office things, for back office work, for accountings, they're very, very progressive there. We're training people to get the computer skills to be able to support that. That's all for me. I think Tom is up next with exploration. Thank you.
Good job, thanks.
Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Cris. I'm just gonna 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 pillows brought in, and we would be here for a while. I'm just gonna talk about some of our highlights that we see so far this year in exploration. Right now, with the addition of a 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 gonna focus most of my attention here.
In Mali, with the recent acquisition of the Bakolobi license, we now hold 25 km along the Senegal-Mali Shear Zone, which is one of the more prolific gold structures in the world. We will very soon start exploring on the Bakolobi license. What I wanna 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 km away from the license, and it has some 670,000 ounces currently in resource. We view some pretty good upside there also. Onto this slide's a bit embarrassing, we started at Fekola around 4 million ounces in resources.
With production of 2 million ounces and the current resources of around 10 million ounces, we're sitting around 12 million ounces. I'm gonna 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. We'll start with 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 and our resource pit.
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. You know, numbers such as 5.7 grams over 7.6, 3.3 over 28, 4.9 over 19, all well within what would be mineable underground numbers. It is still early, and certainly we're not gonna be able to drill this whole area off to indicated from surface as it's a fair way down. You know, the final indicated numbers are gonna come out when we're able to be underground and drill it.
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. 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 wanna put stuff, and then we drill there, and we find things. It's pretty straightforward. I don't know why we didn't think about it earlier.
Anyway, Cardinal, right now we're sitting around 1 million ounces or just over 1 million ounces in resource indicated in the [fir] combined. Drilling below that resource, and specifically if you looked on the left side of that slide, you can see a hole down in the middle there. You know, 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 there at Cardinal alone, where, you know, this accidental discovery still has quite a bit of potential to grow.
Unfortunately, with the amount of exploration we're doing up north this year, we won't get much done on it this year. It does show just in and around Fekola itself, between the underground and Cardinal, there's significant potential. Now on to the Anaconda area with, you know, Bakolobi or Bantako and the old Menankoto license or Medinandi license. There is tremendous potential. This is where I see the big upside for Fekola. You know, you look at this resource, your current resource of just over 3.4 million ounces at over a gram. Interesting about that resource, by the way, at a higher cut off of 0.6, you're still looking at just under 3 million ounces at 1.5 grams.
That shows that within these zones, there's some much higher grade material that, you know, can be, as we talk about being trucked down to Fekola or can support maybe someday after it opened it, some underground material. There are better grades there. This is also interesting. We put out a release this morning that showed some holes in this area, and I'm gonna talk just a couple of them. One of them, the King Brown area, or as we know it, the Vic and Andy area, which is another area where we've used the new exploration tool of combination drilling. We've been finding significant intersections in this area also, which is in between Anaconda and Mamba. The area.
This is just grassroots drilling, so this area, just in the grassroots drilling, is starting to show upside. Now I go to Mamba itself. You know, this is a slide that a lot of people have seen, and we've shown it for some time now. If you look at this remains open down plunge and significantly down plunge. We just had a recent hole 212, which is about 300 meters-400 meters down plunge from our current resource, about 100 meters -200 meters vertical. There's two intersections that's why I've got this range. It had 8 grams over 16 meters in the upper intersection, 2.69 grams over 19 meters. That's a pretty significant step out by anybody's business in the Mamba area itself.
This is one of the zones within the Anaconda area. Again, early on, in my opinion, despite the fact that we've, you know, had a pretty significant resource early on, and we're still getting good intersections well beyond our current resources. 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 gonna grow with as time goes on. I teased Abdoul last night or the other night that his son is gonna be the project geologist there, and his son's only, I don't know, Abdoul, five or six years old, your youngest son? He's a young boy anyway. Recently acquired the license in between Anaconda and Fekola called the Bakolobi license, and I really like this area.
The reason we all like it from the exploration group is it's an area between the license where you go at Fekola to the Senegal-Mali Shear Zone, 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 three or four structures, all of which are gold bearing. You know, there's been some debate on which one is actually the Fekola structure. When you get into the Bakolobi license, you allow me some geological license here. The Fekola structure bifurcates into several structures as you're going north, and it bifurcates in the Bakolobi license. That's key because those sort of areas are the areas structurally where you're gonna find ore bodies.
To date, I forget the exact number, but we have a small resource on the Bakolobi license, and you can see the two areas on the right-hand side of the slide. This is where the license is. On the left-hand side of the slide to 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 satellite resource. We think there's tremendous potential. We know that Anaconda is opened, Anaconda and/or open to the south. They've been open into the Bakolobi license, so there's another area of extremely good exploration potential.
Like I said, I could talk for hours on some of these things, but, you know, I'm just trying to give you a bit of a teaser why we think and believe strongly that the... It's still very early on in the, you know... What's Peter's term?
Fekola Complex.
Fekola Complex. It's still very early on in the Fekola Complex and one thing I like to have said, and I've said it a few times with our group, and it's an embarrassment of riches. This is gonna be around for a long time, and it's gonna be a backbone and a significant part of B2Gold exploration for some time. One of the other things, one of the other exciting things that has happened this year, we all know that, you know, Otjikoto has been producing for some while, and, you know, we've had some success in the Wolfshag area, which is an underground. We've had success to the east of Wolfshag in a small area. This year is the first year we've actually seen something that we think is significant.
Now, if you look at this, 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 in Otjikoto South plunges to the south, and the mineralization actually continues beyond what is open pittable. 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, credit to the guys on site, they drilled some holes 2 km and 4 km south of the Otjikoto pit. What they found is actually now that as you get that far south, the Otjikoto zone is starting to come back up towards surface. It's all of a sudden opened up a huge area of exploration potential.
Not only that, if it does come up back to surface where we're doing surface work right now, it bodes very, very well for the future there. Yeah, I can't read it. Sorry. The intersections there, though, are significant enough that we'll be there for some time exploring up from it. Now, moving on. The other one we're very excited about, and certainly our joint venture partner, Rupert, who's a 70/30 JV. We're operator here has been excited about, and we're certainly very excited about is in Finland. Now, the license we have with our joint venture partners is adjacent to the Rupert discovery. The structure that the Rupert discovery is on extends some. Is it 14 km, Vic? All the way to. Yeah, about 14 km along to what we.
A zone 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 the license. Within that, we have about 800 meters of strike length of significant mineralization. We're starting to get an understanding of this zone. It's got a gentle plunge to the west. It seems to have several zones along it. Some of the intersections we've got, you know, hole 22-18 had one zone, 2 grams over 77 meters, including 4 grams over 24 meters. That's in the heart of this pipe-shaped body.
Hole 29, 22-29, we have 2.6 grams over 50 meters. We're starting to see very significant mineralization with good thicknesses in this area. We're excited about the future of this. 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 gonna be here for a long time and for us in terms of potential. Thank you.
Thanks, Tom. Well, it's pretty clear, I'm sure, as you can see from our presentation today, about our commitment to leaving the places that we work in better shape when we're gone, with all these incredible 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 other opportunities that Bill was talking about as well. It's time to wrap up, and thank you for your patience. It's been a nice meeting, 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 have 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. Just wanna thank our board of directors. We have 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 wanna thank them for their support as well. The executive team, you've met some of them. It's just an honor to work with you guys. We've always been about team first 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 spread throughout the entire our world. Fairly treating people with fairness, respect, and transparency. Also, all of our employees. We have a great, incredible team here in Vancouver. Many people have been with us for a very long time. Our turnover rate 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've so enjoyed going to sites recently in Mali and seeing these local people proudly wearing their B2Gold clothing.
Also, people that help us make this all happen in addition to all of our employees, the governments in the countries in which we work, the local communities, but also our lawyers and auditors and consultants and advisors play a very important role, and our brokers and bankers. We have a great, strong syndicate of bankers. I also wanna 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. 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 in, within our management team. We do have a few changes that are happening now.
Roger Richer on my left, who is our Senior VP of Legal, and Roger's incredibly talented individual I've had the pleasure to work with for 40+ years . Wasn't that right? I know you're thinking we were victims of child labor, but no, it was a little bit older than that.
Five years older than that.
Okay. I just wanna say, sure on behalf of the employees that Roger's retiring at the end of this month, after a very successful, long and successful career with us. He's gonna stay involved because I really 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. Roger's been a great friend and a teammate, and we've had some incredible adventures around the world from Russia to Southern Africa and lots of places in between. I just wanna thank Roger on behalf of everyone for his contribution, and I know it'll be ongoing as well. Roger, thank you. Thank you very much.
Just as that, we've had some additions to the executive team. Vic King, who's over here, has been, you know, 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. Raphaël Wagner, who's been promoted to the position of Vice President of West Africa. Raphaël was our lawyer working for us for quite a long time from with the 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. I do wanna thank you all for your time and your attention. We're gonna have some beverages out in the back here. Please join us if you can.
You can see why we're pretty proud of what we've done in 2021 and very excited about the future for B2Gold. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you.
No questions?
Oh, sorry. What's that? Sorry. I'm supposed to open up for questions. I'm sorry. You can ask us now, or you can ask us over a beverage if there's questions here, if there's any, 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 Chatwin. I forgot Randall. Randall's also been just taking Roger's position as the Senior VP, Legal and Corporate Communications. Another excellent addition to the team. We've worked together for a very long time. He's now been in this exciting new position. Thank you again.