Welcome to Annual General Meeting for 2020 for B2Gold. We're going to walk through the formal portion of the presentation first, all of the regulatory requirements, et cetera, and talk about the voting this year, et cetera. Our Chairman, Bob Cross, was unable to be here today. His son is graduating from university in California, that's a pretty legit reason. He sends his best. I will chair this portion of the meeting. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Clive Johnson, President, Chief Executive Officer, Director, and founder of B2Gold. It is my pleasure to welcome you and to call to order the 2021 Annual General and Special Meeting of the shareholders of B2Gold Corp. I think I said 2020 before.
In order to comply with the provincial health orders relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are hosting the meeting through this virtual platform, accessible to all our shareholders who have followed the procedure described in the information circular for the meeting to participate, submit questions, and vote regardless of physical location. Please ensure you remain connected to the internet during the course of this meeting. I will act as chair of this meeting, and I appoint Roger Richer, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of the company, and founder to act as recording secretary of this meeting, and Anita Basi of Computershare Investor Services to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present for the meeting today are my fellow directors, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, Robin Weisman, and Liane Kelly.
The other officers of the company attending the meeting today include Mike Cinnamond, Senior Vice President of Finance, Chief Financial Officer, Roger Richer, who I mentioned, Tom Garagan, Senior Vice President of Exploration, founder, Dennis Stansbury, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Project Evaluations, founder, Bill Lytle, Senior Vice President of Operations, Ian MacLean, Vice President, Investor Relations, and founder, Dale Craig, President of Operations, Eduard Bartz, Vice President of Taxation and External Reporting, Victor King, Vice President of Exploration, Brian Scott, Vice President of Geology and Technical Services, John Rajala, Vice President of Metallurgy, and from Ottawa, Neil Reeder, Vice President of Government Relations, Dana Rogers, Vice President of Finance, Randy Reichert, Vice President of Operations, and Randall Chatwin, Vice President, Associate General Counsel. Now, for the business of the meeting.
Notice of this meeting was filed, and the notice calling this meeting together with the information circular and proxy form was mailed to the shareholders on May 11th, 2021. 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. The recording secretary has notified me that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting properly constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting.
I propose that we deal first with all of the routine business requirements and then terminate the formal meeting and carry on in a less formal manner by way of an opportunity for questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders about the company's activities and operations. As this is a virtual meeting, I would like to set out a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. Questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the message 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 duplicative questions will not receive a response.
Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled. It would be appreciated 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. Voting on all matters at this meeting will be conducted by electronic ballot. To allow sufficient time for voting, the polls for all matters 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.
For any motions duly brought before the meeting, not included in the circular, the polls for such matters will be opened and closed as I deem necessary or desirable for the orderly and expeditious conduct of the meeting. 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 on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting and will be asked to vote on each business item. I remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you have already voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again. 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 virtual meeting is concluded, I will give registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders one final opportunity to enter their votes on the open polls if they haven't already done so, and then declare voting closed on all resolutions. To vote, simply click on your choice for or withhold or against as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply change your selection. When the poll closes, the votes submitted on each resolution item will be recorded through the virtual meeting platform. The totals in favor, or against, or withheld, as applicable 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. The first item of business is the presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31st, 2020, and the auditor's report on the financial statements. The financial statements were mailed to the shareholders on April 28, 2021, and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. Two representatives of the auditor are attending the meeting today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for the auditor, Len Wadsworth and Melanie Matthews of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP chartered accountants are available to respond. I just said that right there. The next item of business is to set the number of directors.
Mr. Chair, my name is Roger Richer, and I am a registered shareholder, and I move that the number of directors be set at nine.
Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? As 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. 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, and accordingly, management's nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors?
Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as directors: Clive Johnson, Robert Cross, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Liane Kelly, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, and Robin Weisman.
I would ask for a motion that the 9 nine persons 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 and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. 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? As there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution ratifying, approving, and confirming the company's amended advance notice policy. The background behind this motion, a summary of the amendments to the advance notice policy, and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 10 and 11 and Appendix C of the circular. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution ratifying, approving, and confirming the amended advance notice policy. To take effect, the resolution must be approved by a majority of the votes cast through the virtual meeting platform or by proxy.
May I have a motion to ratify, approve, and confirm the amended advance notice policy in the form of the resolution set out on page 11 of the circular?
I so move.
Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? As 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. The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution ratifying, approving, and confirming all unallocated options, rights, and other entitlements issuable pursuant to the 2018 stock option plan. The background behind this motion and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 11 to 14 and Appendix B of the circular. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the stock option plan resolution. To take effect, the resolution must be approved by a majority of the votes cast through the virtual meeting platform or by proxy.
May I have a motion to ratify, approve, and confirm all unallocated options, rights, and other entitlements issuable pursuant to the 2018 stock option plan in the form of resolution set out on page 14 of the circular?
I so move.
Are there any questions or discussion with respect to the resolution? As 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. The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution on a non-binding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation. The background behind this motion and the proposed form of the non-binding advisory resolution are set out on page 14 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 recommend that shareholders vote for the resolution on a non-binding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation.
As this is an advisory vote, the results will not be binding upon the board. The board will take the results of the vote into account as appropriate when considering future executive compensation policies, procedures, and decisions. May I have a motion to approve, on a non-binding advisory basis, the form of the resolution set out on page 14 of the circular, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation?
I so move.
Are there any questions or discussions with respect to this resolution? As there are no questions or discussion, I direct 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. 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 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.
I now have the preliminary results scrutineer's report for the matter set forth in the circular. Based on these preliminary results scrutineer's report, I declare that the number of directors of the company has been set at nine. As a 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 to ratify, approve, and confirm the amended advance notice policy has been carried. The resolution to ratify, approve, and confirm the unallocated options, rights, and other entitlements issuable pursuant to the company's 2018 stock option plan has been carried.
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. You supposed to read out the numbers?
Don't have to if you don't want to.
Sorry. Okay. That might be kind of fun. Okay. The numbers of directors, 99.83% of the votes were voted for. For the directors themselves, Kevin Bullock, 86% . For, Robert Cross, 75.97%. For, Robert Gayton, 74.92% . For, Mr. Clive Johnson, 94.91%. George Johnson, 86.51%. Ms. Liane Kelly, 92.7%. Mr. Jerry Korpan, 74.9%. Mr. Bongani Mtshisi, 86.06%. Ms. Robin Weisman, 93.5%. Appointment of the auditors received 99% of the votes, and the reapproval of the stock option plan received 93% of the votes. Advisory vote on the executive compensation received 93.8% for votes. What was the total number of shares that were voted?
75%, Clive.
75% of the shares held in the B2Gold were voted at the annual general meeting, and we thank our shareholders. That's a remarkable number. The scrutineers tell me that typically it's somewhere between 35% and maybe 40% for a public company. I think that's great. We pride ourselves on our transparency with our shareholders. We work for the shareholders. We have great respect for our shareholders as the owners of the company. That's a very good result and a humbling result. Thank you to the shareholders for your confidence in the board of directors and the management of the company. All the business for which this meeting was called has been completed following termination of the 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 now invite registered shareholders or proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments to do so through the virtual platform. Are there any further questions? There will be a Q&A session at the end of the informal presentation as well. There being no further questions and the formal part of the meeting having previously been terminated, I declare the meeting terminated. Thank you for your attendance and stay safe during these unprecedented times. That's it. Just going to wait a few seconds so they can set up for the presentation that's coming up now. Okay, we're good to go. All right. Well, thank you for attending the formal part of the meeting.
Now we can talk about some exciting things that have happened in B2Gold in 2020 and so far in 2021. Today, you're going to hear from me with an initial overview at a very high level of what's happened in the company, and then you're going to hear a little bit of me talking about the state of the market in B2Gold shares today and the past year and a half. I think it's important to talk about that. Also, I'm going to give you a little of an idea of what's coming up next in terms of strategy and development of the company looking forward.
A lot of this stuff tends to get buried to the end of the presentation, so I thought today we'd get some of this up front because after a couple of hours, some of that stuff doesn't necessarily resonate perhaps as much as it should. I'm going to present that overview. Mike Cinnamond, Senior VP , Finance and Chief Financial Officer, is going to take us through the financial results. Remotely, Bill Lytle is going to give us a live feed, Senior VP of Operations, on what's happening operationally in the company and talk about some of our development projects. Tom Garagan to my right, Senior VP , Exploration, is going to take us through some very exciting exploration projects we have.
You all know we've had a tremendous history of discovering gold, both in terms of brownfields exploration around existing mines, continuing to increase resources, reserves, and extend the mine life at the mines, but also earlier stage grassroots discoveries. Tom's got some really exciting projects and opportunities now at Los Andes that some of them we've been working on for, I don't know, 15 years or so, staying in touch with people in Uzbekistan and places like that. Exploration has always been a very important part of the success of B2Gold and Bema Gold before that.
Bill's going to get back up and talk about ESG, which of course is a very hot topic in the world today, and a lot of institutional investors are looking to make sure that companies are being responsible in those critical areas looking forward in climate change, et cetera, and what we're doing socially, environmentally. I'm really proud to say that we think we are on the cutting edge of those technologies and have been for years. We were doing this kind of stuff before it had fancy titles. Now a lot of people are doing it because it's required by shareholders and by countries and governments and governance. We've been doing it for a long time, for decades, because it's the right thing to do.
This is a disclaimer that says a lot of words that says really what it says is that certain things I'm going to say and the other gentleman might say may be subject to change. See, you could have just said it in those words, I think, but I'm not a lawyer. This map just shows you our projects around the world. Obviously, a very international company based here in Vancouver, and many of you, of course, as existing shareholders will be quite familiar with the journey that we've been on for the last 13 years since we created this company at zero. We're going to hear today about the three mines, Masbate in the Philippines, Otjikoto in Namibia, and of course, Fekola in Mali. We're going to talk about some of the development projects, Burkina Faso, Kiaka, and the Gramalote project in Colombia.
We're going to talk about exploration in places like Uzbekistan and Finland and elsewhere. There's a few other places we're working on around the world looking for world-class targets that I promised Tom I wouldn't divulge the locations just yet. Competition tends to see our success and then immediately follow, attempting to replicate it. Some of the highlights for this year, and once again, I don't want this to be really repetitive, so I'm just giving a high-level view of some of these things. First and foremost, despite the challenges of COVID, we were able to record in 2020 our 12th year in a row of record annual gold production. This last year, over 1 million ounces of gold. That's a remarkable accomplishment and a remarkable story of perhaps unprecedented growth in the gold mining industry.
I will come back at the end of this, and you can remind me if I forget anything at the bottom of the slide. I want to come back and talk about COVID a little bit more, and Bill's going to give us quite a bit about how we've dealt with it. It's been quite remarkable. We continue to be one of the lowest cost gold producers in the world. Our all-in sustaining costs, the more important number is $788 an ounce, one of the lowest. Our record annual consolidated revenues, quite an astounding number of $1.8 billion. Record annual consolidated cash flows from operating activities, I like the $0.95 billion or $950 million consolidated cash flow in 2020.
We repaid the balance, you'll hear from Mike, of our revolving credit facility, with a great group of bankers who believed in us in the earlier days, when there was some risk involved in the industry we're in and construction of those things. They've been well rewarded, and they're standing by, willing and able to lend us money as appropriate to continue to grow the company. Very strong financial position. I think around $500 million at the end of the year in cash, and basically debt-free, with the exception of some mining trucks like that one that are on equipment leases that are paid over four or five years, which is fairly typical of our industry. That's a remarkable place to be today, and that has allowed us to pay one of the highest yielding dividends in the gold mining industry.
Gold mining companies are not famous for paying dividends. Gold companies are better run than they've been. And they're watching the bottom line a lot more than just waiting to see if gold goes up and saves their ass, or if they find a lot more all of a sudden. Suddenly, gold mining companies more and more are being run like a business, and I've always argued that we should run it like a business. We shouldn't need gold to go higher or to suddenly find way more ounces of gold to make our acquisitions make sense or to make our business make sense. I think our strategy's worked rather well, to put it subtly, I suppose.
The dividend was increased to $0.04 a share because of the dramatic increase in cash from operations, and that yields about 4%, which is one of the higher in the I guess it's high 3% probably right now. That's been great. The idea going forward strategically is to continue to do what we've done, and I believe most of our shareholders love the dividend. Who doesn't? I kind of like it, too. At the end of the day, our goal is to continue to increase the dividend as appropriate, but only using a portion of our cash from operations to use it for that purpose, to reward the shareholders for their support. The rest of the money, we want to be able to grow the company.
Yes, we can tap into the banks, but we also want a good, solid cash from operations so we can continue to do things like our $65 million exploration budget this year. If you look at our history in exploration, dramatic success in terms of the money we spent on exploration to the ounces that we find around the mines or elsewhere. We want that flexibility and want the ability to use a combination, perhaps, of debt and some equity, sorry, debt and some cash, maybe a bit of equity, but when we build and expand our mines. We are going to continue to advance our development and exploration projects for future growth.
I think it's important to remember what got us here after creating this company 13 years ago, and what got us here is a very disciplined approach to acquisitions, and exploration to allow this pretty much unprecedented growth. I want to circle back a little bit and talk about COVID from my perspective, or I guess the corporate perspective, and Bill will give us some more of the details. We're really proud of the way that our employees responded to COVID and all of our stakeholders and the governments in where we work. It's been a lot of work to maintain and to actually reach a record gold production and expand the Fekola mill during COVID. I think it's a real testament to the culture and the strategy and what this company is all about.
Because the countries which we work, which we mine, they don't have a large safety net in cash or the ability in the COVID crisis to throw massive amounts of money at it, as some countries do. It was really critical. The three countries, the Philippines, Namibia, and Mali, declared that mining was one of the essential businesses, and therefore the priority was to allow us to continue to mine if we could do it safely. This is where I think the culture kicks in because people talk a lot about social license, earning the license to operate by doing the right thing socially and environmentally, et cetera. We're very proud of the reaction to, and the realization of just how strong our social license is in the countries in which we work.
Because we all had something in common, the employees, the governments, the communities where we work, and the company, and its directors and shareholders, which was to continue to mine as long as we could do it safely. There was a great trust between those groups, the employees, the governments, local and federal, and the company. That's very rewarding because we preach every year, and we talk about it all the time on site and here. Everywhere, we talk about treating people the B2Gold Way, which is an extension of the Canadian culture, I believe. That is treating people with fairness, respect, and transparency. The social license we have today and the trust that we've seen during COVID really makes us feel very good about the social license and about the culture.
I think that the remarkable, and Bill can talk in more detail, and there's lots of stuff on the website, but every country, every mine, of course, is different and has its different challenges in mining and everything else, but it also has its different challenges in terms of COVID. We took a different approach in each country and worked very closely, as we always do, I think, with the local people. How can we help not only the employees at the mine, but the communities in which we work? Generally, as you know our track record for that, but also now specifically opposite COVID. You'll see that we really stepped up here in Vancouver as well to support groups that were really hurting a lot during COVID.
I think to me, that's been very rewarding for all of us, I would say. Very rewarding to see the payback in when you do the right thing, which is treat people with fairness, respect, and transparency. The payback isn't necessarily financial. I'm talking more about the payback and the trust. It's been a tiresome experience. It's been very difficult, but it's been very rewarding at the same time. I usually show the slide once or twice because it's such a good slide in presentations, but I just want to remind us of what we're all about and what we've done here in the last over 13 years. That is a dramatic growth, perhaps unprecedented in the industry when we started this company in 2010, I guess it was, or 2011.
Growing the gold production from zero and the market cap from zero to where we are today, last year, over 1 million ounces of gold. Looking at this slide, I think it would be hard to imagine that pretty much the same group of individuals, combined with additional highly qualified individuals, wouldn't aspire to continue this growth. That's what I talked a bit about earlier, about our desire to, yes, pay a dividend, but also continue using some of our cash from operations to continue to grow. We're always looking for opportunities, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. One of the things that's made this so successful, and I know I've talked about this before, but it's probably worth repeating a little bit.
That's the management of political risk and what we've done all over the world in the Bema days, in places like Russia, South Africa, and Chile, and it carried on into the B2Gold years. I think one of the great reasons for our success is our discipline and acquisitions and what we do, it's also managing political risk and really understanding societies and cultures and learning how to work with them in their best interest. I want to talk a little bit about Mali, I know Bill's going to talk about it, there's been some political upheaval in Mali, as many people have seen in the news. Fortunately, it's been, for the very most part, been nonviolent. Mali is a country that has been very good for gold mining, gold mining has been very good for Mali for decades.
You can talk to Randgold, they have been there for decades, successfully, now owned by Barrick, or Barrick took over Randgold, and many other companies, foreign companies, that have been extremely successful. The government of Mali historically has been a really good government to work with. You look at the success of our Fekola mine and what we've done in Fekola in the short years, expanding the mill twice and making it a great joint venture for ourselves and the government that owns 20%, being held up by the president at the mine opening as the kind of company that they want everyone else in gold mining to emulate, the B2Gold experience at Fekola. We're watching the government change closely. The government's variations thereof seem to realize the importance of gold mining in Mali.
It's a very fragile economy pre-COVID. Obviously, clearly, they need business and they need foreign investment. As I said, there's been a tremendous track record of Malian governments respecting the rule of law in their country as we've respected the rule of law in our country and everywhere else. Recently, we got into a bit of a dispute on an expiration of license 20 km north of Fekola, called Menankoto, and part of the Anaconda region. We spent a lot of money there, $27 million, in fact, discovering more gold. We think there's an opportunity, as you'll hear, to truck some of that ore down to Fekola in the near term, maybe the second quarter of next year, to actually increase throughput at the mine and increase gold production, increasing profits and revenue for ourselves and the government of Mali.
Recently, we applied for a routine, what we thought was a routine extension of the expiration license. Once again, Mike, Bill will talk more about this. There was some, I guess the politically correct term was there might have been some administrative errors in the process, which the license was actually awarded to someone else. We think that was against the laws of the country, and we're looking to work with the government to resolve the dispute and get what we think we are legally entitled to as our shareholders and as our partner, the government of Mali and the local people in the communities where we will generate all these jobs. The only place that the ore from Menankoto should be milled is at the Fekola mill. We've done this very well for many, many years in many different situations.
I remember the reaction when I announced in 1998 that Bema was going into Russia. Everyone said, "Well, that's crazy." The two most negativists in the world are gold and Russia at the time. Gold was $300 an ounce. I said, "Yes, it's a double contrarian play. One of them is going to get better." We went and we were hugely successful, as you know, in Russia and many other countries because of the commitment to understanding culture and political risk. I think one of the reasons we do so well with any crisis, like COVID or anything else, we've been through earthquakes, we've been through typhoons, we've been through all sorts of things, government changes and all sorts of things, but it's our ability to solve problems. We're problem solvers. We're not looking for excuses not to do things. We're looking for reasons to do things.
We've done that for 35 years. We're very good at crisis management, problem-solving. COVID is another great example of that. I just want to mention, I know the guys will talk about it, but just really, the commitment of our employees is just remarkable to me. I think it's something like 4,300 employees worldwide, and most of them direct employees. We want everyone to have a shirt on that says B2Gold, Namibia or B2Gold, Mali or Masbate. Talk about people stepping up at a difficult time during COVID. That's been remarkable. I just really want to thank all of our employees for that tremendous effort. There's a couple of these slides, and then I'll let the other guys talk about the exciting details of things we're doing. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the market.
We finally were recognized, I think, for what we'd done in terms of this price of our shares after me banging on the table for years going, "This is not fair." We weren't reflecting the value of what we created, including looking at cash flow and everything else. It was stubborn and the market was slow because partly because we're so contrarian, we were building the Fekola mine and the Otjikoto mine. There were very few companies in the world were building mines because shareholders hated growth because of the failings of others. We persevered and carried on, and we saw a tremendous, obviously, rise in our stock price in the middle of last year. We just nudged CAD 10 there. That'd be a CAD 10 billion Canadian market cap. Obviously, the market's come off since then, but despite that, we continue to perform tremendously well.
I sometimes think that the gold price, when it sort of touched $2,000 briefly, that recently you'd think that gold price would go down to $1,200 or something. When you look at the amount of money we're making at $1,800 or almost $1,900 gold, it's remarkable. Gold is very fickle, and gold investors are very fickle. I think we're trailing a little bit behind our company and some of the others on where we should be today. Still, when you look at us compared to the gold index and the gold price for 2020, we're up 29%, up way more than that in the middle of the summer, as I said, but still up 29%. When you look at the XGD index there, up 18%, GDX index. The gold price was up 16% and the GDX index up 13%.
We clearly outperformed, and I expect us to continue to, and perhaps more dramatically as we go on. It's not just about our gold prices, it's about what you do. This is another good slide that Ian had put together. This is pretty dramatic. This talks about, on the left-hand side, B2Gold, the operating cash flow growth from 2017 to 2020. We grew cash flow from operations 513% to that $950 number we talked about. This is in no way disparaging of any of our competitors. If you look at the list of, these are, there's a lot of good companies here that I respect. We clearly outperformed the sector, partly because of our strategy and our stubbornness about being contrarian. Look how well it worked. This is also very interesting, net cash change.
Once again, a lot of my time or thinking is about strategy, and the strategy over many years, we're quite proud of how that's worked. Not that many years ago, when we went into Fekola, our stock price was way down, a lot worse, but we were getting hammered because we had the audacity to want to build a gold mine given our successful track record. We didn't want to dilute our shareholders in a big way because of the low share price. We took on some debt, about a reasonable amount of debt. Mike did a tremendous job and his team on that. That's why we showed a deficit of $474 million in December 2017, because we'd spent all the money on Fekola to build the mine.
Well, Fekola was such a remarkable success and since expanded twice that we've actually turned it around completely and gone from $474 million deficit to $513 million in net cash change. That's almost a $1 billion swing. That's a great strategy. It was not common to be building mines at that time. We didn't dilute the shareholders. We used a sensible amount of debt, which is now repaid. Now we're debt-free. It's a great type of strategy, and it's really great when it works. This is just the five-year share price performance. Once again, pretty dramatic outperformance of the indexes. We're up 182%, and as you can see, we were up way higher than that in the middle of last year. If you compare us to the gold price, which is up 57%, the XGD index 72%, and GDX 74%.
Dramatic outperformance despite the correction in the market across the gold sector quite recently. Finally, this one exciting stuff, not that this isn't. The strategy really is more of the same, just to maintain our highest standards of responsible mining, CSR, ESG. One of the world leaders in health safety, environmental safety of our employees, Darren Parry leads that team. It's been remarkable. You're gonna hear some statistics that are quite incredible. Don't forget, this is all a time where we've been growing this company as well. The ability to meet these highest standards of ESG, CSR, safety, responsibility during a time of dramatic growth over a number of years, that to me, I think that's something that we should all be very proud of, all of our workers.
We're going to continue to maximize the profitability of our mines, of course, working with our great teams around the world, and also financially, of course, remain strong, et cetera. We're going to continue to grow, and we're looking at a little more about Gramalote, which unfortunately, the Gramalote feasibility work that was being done, we looked at the results recently of the work to date. While it was a positive project and some had argued to move forward with developing it, the economics were positive. We feel there's a better project there, and it seems that our partner, AGA, might agree. We're looking to do a lot more work now, more drilling to find out more ounces to divide the capital cost by. We're also looking at various ways to decrease the capital expenditure currently estimated at around $900 million.
We think there's a project here, and we've got work to do. We think by the first quarter of next year, we expect to release a feasibility study. You'll hear a bit more about some of these other projects as well. Finally, M&A, we get asked this question a lot. Are you gonna do M&A? Are you gonna merge with other companies? You've taken over smaller companies in the past with great success. Are you gonna do it again? We're always looking for things, but we have this problem. It's not really a problem, but we have an issue, and that is that we are so determined to be responsible in any of our acquisitions, which has kept us out of trouble. Unfortunately, this industry saw a lot of bad acquisitions over the last, let's say five years ago to 15 years ago.
It's gotten better. We're not going to acquire anything assuming gold's going higher or we're going to find more gold to justify the purchase price and acquisition. We're going to bring that discipline. There are special situations like we had in the Philippines where we can bring our expertise to bear to make a mine a much better mine. Things like that, also looking at opportunities. The cheapest ounces will always be the ones you find, exploration is going to be, as I mentioned, a huge part of it. I think that's most of what I wanted to share with you, rather than have the big wrap up at the end, and I think it's a sound strategy.
The record seems to prove that. We're very excited about the future for B2Gold. We're very much looking forward to getting out of this COVID-19 challenge, which has been extraordinary for everyone around the world. There are better times ahead. Sometimes it doesn't feel like it as COVID goes on and on. There are. There are better times ahead and not too far down the road. Hopefully, we can have next year, the more traditional AGM with a great turnout and a big party somewhere as well. That's what I want to share with you. I'm going to pass it over to Mike now. Mike's thinking, "God, he said he was going to be short.
Okay. Thanks, Clive. I'm going to give you a financial overview, although fair to say that Clive's given you a fair amount of it already. I think as he's getting older, he's learning to embrace his inner accountant. It's good to see. I'm going to give you a brief reminder of what 2020's results look like. Frankly, they're not difficult results to talk about. We had a fantastic year in 2020. Just to remind you as well and give you a quick picture of how we see 2021 and how we think it's going to turn out through the year. Firstly, 2020, record annual production, just over 1,040,000 ounces. That's right at the upper end of our guidance range of 1,000,000-1,055,000 ounces. As Clive described it, the remarkable thing about that is that's in a COVID year.
That's in a pandemic year, when a lot of the world shut down and struggled mining, and our operations were recognized by the governments in the countries where we operate as very important key industries. We were able to hit that upper end of our guidance, which I think is a tremendous achievement and much kudos to everyone at site and, of course, everyone here who helps support those operations. If you look at that performance, I think it's a strong performance, like I said, at all the sites, but in particular Fekola. Fekola, we saw the Fekola expansion come to fruition in 2020, firstly, bringing on a major part of the expansion fleet earlier in the year so that we could move more material, and then also with completion of the Fekola mill expansion in the third quarter.
That allowed us to move more material, put more stuff through the mill, and access higher grades, better grades up front. We saw Fekola had a phenomenal performance, more than 620,000 ounces. That translated into the results on the cost side as well. Cash costs, $423 per ounce, again, right at the lower end of our guidance range of $415-$455. As well as the production, the great production on site, what also fed into that was we saw lower fuel costs. As you know, the global fuel prices dipped in the earlier stages of the pandemic in 2020.
A weaker Namibian dollar, so we had some foreign exchange gains there, and also just some of the mine sequencing changes that occurred in order to react to having to deal with some of the COVID challenges at sites helped to reduce those costs during the year. All-in sustaining costs were $788 per ounce sold. That's at the low end of our range of $780-$820. Really for the same reasons as we saw on the cash cost side, plus we saw a deferral or just some stripping costs that just weren't incurred during 2020. As we reacted to those mining sequencing changes to react to COVID. If you look at what did that translate into? Firstly, on the sales side, record gold revenues, $1.8 billion. I just like saying that number. It's a good number.
On the cash flow, operating cash flow side, $951 million. That's almost double what that number was in 2019. We had a very good year in 2019 to start with. 2020, phenomenal year. That level of operating cash flow allowed us to complete the capital programs that we did have on site. It allowed us pay a very competitive dividend that we increased through the year up to now $0.16 per share U.S. annualized for the year. We were able to pay down, as Clive described, any outstanding balances on our revolver and finish the year in very good shape. Just to give you a quick idea of how we see 2021 shaping up for our budget. We announced this earlier in the year. On the production side, guidance range 970,000-1,030,000 ounces.
Again, around about that million ounce level and pretty consistent with what we saw this year. A little lower, but not much, pretty close. When you hear from Bill a little later on in the presentation, you'll hear how we think we can see ourselves around that level on average for somewhere in the next five years with what we see at our sites and what we think we can bring on. Very good solid number and the sort of number that we see recurring for a while. I should mention, though, on the production side for 2021, it's a tale of two halves in the year. We do have fairly significant stripping programs to be incurred both at Fekola to strip phases 5 and 6, and also at the Otjikoto mine to strip Wolfshag phase 3.
We'll access those sort of higher-grade ores more in the second half of the year. That means that approximate 1 million ounce number for our guidance for 2021, that's weighted quite significantly the second half, 400,000 ounces in the first half, 600,000 ounces in the second. We also will see that in terms of the cash cost and all-in sustaining costs that we see for the year. Overall for the year, $500-$540 on the cash operating cost side, $870-$910 per ounce on the all-in sustaining cost side. We will see slightly higher costs in the first half of the year, and then they'll come down significantly in the second half of the year as production increases. Overall, those cost ranges per ounce, very competitive when you look at how we stack up against our contemporaries.
Gold revenues for the year, we think will be about $1.7 billion, just slightly lower than the current year. We've got slightly lower production. This assumes an $1,800 gold price. However, as you know, the price is higher than that and has been for a while now. That's a good sign. What we see on the cash flow from operating activities, this year we got $630 million forecast for the year, again, at that $1,800 gold price. That has even more significant weighting in the second half. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is, as I said, on the production side, we'll have less ounces to sell in the first half of the year because we'll have lower production.
We have some significant tax balances to pay in the second quarter that'll end at the end of June now. Those relate to 2020 cash taxes and priority dividends mainly related to Mali. They reflect we had a great year in 2020. The statutory timing of the payment of those is in the second quarter of 2021. We'll have about $140 million that we'll have to pay down basically in the second quarter that relates to 2020. We had $146 million cash flow from operations in Q1. We saw a significant cash flow from ops being generated in the second quarter, like I say, we'll have $140 million to pay for those tax obligations, priority dividend.
We'll have approximately $500 million of operating cash flows that we think we'll see come through in the second half of the year. That was our guidance for the year. If you look at how are we looking Q1-wise, well, the answer is we're progressing well, I think, against the budget and those guidance ranges. We had just over 220,000 ounces in the first quarter. That's about 9% higher than we budgeted. Again, it's a story of good production and good operations at all sites. Fekola, the mill throughput just continues to outperform. We had estimated/guesstimated the mill throughput for 2021 at 7.75 million tons. It is a new mill expansion that we just put in. We're currently evaluating just how high it can go.
In the first quarter, we had a record almost 2.1 million tons through the mill, which is higher than we budgeted. At Masbate, we just continue to get better recovery materials than we have in the model right now coming through the mill. That's excellent. Otjikoto just had a very solid first quarter across all areas. That's going well, and I think we're well on track to meet our guidance range of 970,000-1,030,000 ounces. On the cost side, cash operating cost, $609 per ounce produced, higher than last year, although you saw the outlook for last year. As I mentioned, the costs are definitely weighted to the first two quarters of 2021.
Even at that $609 per ounce produced, that is $54 per ounce lower than budget, and that is mainly driven by the higher production that we saw in Q1. Same story or even better story on the all-in sustaining cost side, $932 per ounce sold. That is $146 lower than budget, and that is a function of those lower cash costs I just described, but also the timing of the CapEx. Some of the CapEx that we thought we would incur in the first quarter will actually be pushed out to a little later in the year. The other items here, I think we already talked about the revenue and then that $630 million from operating cash flows for the year. Maybe just finally just to describe where does that leave us liquidity-wise, I guess, balance sheet-wise? Well, it leaves us in very good shape.
Over $500 million cash equivalents in the bank at the end of the first quarter. As Clive has mentioned in his detailed analysis of the finances, that's really the only data outstanding at the end of the first quarter, were some equipment loans related to our fleet, which is normal, and also some property leases. Very good shape, net cash flow-wise and debt-wise. The whole amount of the revolver is currently available. That's $600 million, the RCF, and there's a $200 million accordion feature to that, too. Should any other banks want to come into the consortium, we could add another $200 million to that $600 million of available liquidity. We very recently, in fact, very recently today, announced the cash dividend for the second quarter of another $0.04 U.S. per share or that $0.16 annualized per year.
That's somewhere in the low 3%, it's over 3% yield, which again, is very competitive at the high end if you look at our contemporary companies and the gold mining companies. It's a very solid dividend rate. Our intention is to maintain paying dividends at those rates, and that'll let us really complete our CapEx programs, complete the extended exploration programs, and all this exploration activity that we have around the world, and also allow us to plan for any development for projects as needed as we look forward. That's a brief summary of the finances. Fair to say that we're in good shape.
Now I'm going to hand you over to Bill Lytle. Bill's our Senior VP Ops, and I guess like any good ops guy, he's actually beaming in live from site at Fekola. We may need a second or two just to bring him online, but Bill will be with us very shortly. Thank you.
Okay. I hope you can hear me. I am in West Africa right now. I'm at the Fekola site. I have two sections tonight. I want to start out with operations. I think Tom's going to talk a little bit about exploration. I'm going to come back and talk about ESG. Starting with operations, I want to start with the health and safety performance that we had for the year. Typically, you would try and improve year-over-year. Given COVID, we were worried about what might happen given the fact that we couldn't get out to site. We couldn't really drive some of the programs we'd had. I have to say that the sites themselves really went above and beyond and really, despite the problems with COVID, had an amazing year.
If you look at slide 21, this is a table which is put out by ICMM which really compares us against all of our key competitors. What you see, I presented this last year as well, and last year we were in the middle of the pack. This year, we're way out on the right-hand side, almost at the very best for 2020. If you look at Q1 of 2021, you can see that so far, obviously not everybody's numbers are out, what you can see is that we would be an industry leader really as far as the lost time injury frequency rate. What you see is really an amazing performance by site. The question begs, how do you really improve upon that? What we're really looking at going forward is how do we get back to the basics?
How do we drive our numbers even lower by doubling down on doing the basic things that you have to do day in and day out, and making sure that all your procedures are in place? Going to slide 22, looking at the operational results. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this because certainly Clive hit up on it and Mike gave a lot of these numbers too. I think the key takeaway is last year when we were at the AGM, we were talking about how the sites had adapted to COVID, and how really we had talked about potentially it wasn't a sprint, it was more of a marathon. Now you can see here we are over one year into it, and the sites, as Clive alluded to, continued to perform day in and day out.
For the entire year of 2020, all three of our sites, all three of our operational sites exceeded guidance. They didn't just exceed guidance in the sense that their ounces were up. They also continued to perform in all areas. I talked about health and safety. We won some very prestigious awards on the CSR side, which I'll talk about during the ESG section. We continued to develop projects, which is really key to make sure as we come out of COVID, that we've got a path forward. All of the sites continue to implement continuous improvement on all the sites, which I'll talk about as we go through this presentation. I'm on slide 23 now. Just looking at what happened outside of the production as far as the development. All these five topics here will be expanded upon in the coming slides.
Think about this, during COVID, when it was almost impossible to travel, we expanded the Fekola mill. We expanded it from 6.0 million tons to 7.5 million tons per annum. We were always kind of cheeky about what that number was. Was it 7.5 million tons? Was it 8 million tons? What our VP of Metallurgy, John O'Halloran, was always saying was, "Listen, what we're talking about, you need to always tell people that we're talking about whatever we think the maximum is at the hardest ore type, we're really that + 1.5 million tons." We came out in September of commissioning, and we did a test to see where we could get to, and what we showed without much difficulty is that we could run above 8 million tons per annum.
That's important as we go forward because what you'll see is that there's the potential now to increase the ounce profile at Fekola as we increase the throughput. We were talking about this kind of 8.0 million tons, and if you follow us at all at Q1 of this year, you'll see that we're actually above that. Now what is the number? We haven't officially landed on a number, but certainly before budgets go out in September, we think we're going to be significantly above 8 million tons and at probably closer to 8.5 million tons. In association with that, the exploration group, as part of a condemnation program a couple of years ago, they identified a new resource, which is 500 m west of the Fekola mine, known as the Cardinal resource.
That resource that has an inferred resource on it, and we made the decision because we want to get it out of the way, because ultimately we want to put a waste dump there. We've decided that we are going to mine that as an inferred resource right now. We petitioned the government, received approval here in Mali to take a bulk sample. That bulk sample was approved, and that bulk sample is now basically sitting on the ROM pad and getting ready to go into the mill. We promised it before Q2, and it looks like that's going to happen. We're also in the process now of putting a mine plan on that. Randy Reichert, our VP of Operations, is actually here with me in Mali, getting ready to submit that to the government.
The Cardinal zone is located within our existing mine license area, within our existing permit. We don't have to do a full approval process. We have completed an ESIA. Now we're just submitting the mine plan, which will basically roll into our annual mine plan going forward. We see in the second half of the year that we'll have the potential to start mining that. Certainly, we have the potential to add additional ounces, which we previously talked about into the Fekola life of mine for 2020 and going forward after that. The Anaconda project, we're going to talk a good deal about that project. That project is part of the Menankoto license, which is currently under dispute. There's also a second license which is within the Anaconda project. We'll talk more about that in just a couple of slides.
At the Otjikoto mine, we had talked about potentially in 2020 developing the Wolfshag underground. This has the potential to significantly increase our ounce profile as we go through 2021 through 2025. We'll talk about the success of that development, but we're also going to talk about the fact that the exploration group has identified a couple more very exciting areas where we continue to see the potential to not only increase the ounce profile but potentially increase the life of mine there as well. Then Clive alluded to the Gramalote project, and there's a couple of slides really going into depth on this. The Gramalote project, we basically finished up the first step of looking at the feasibility study, which was based on some work that AGA had done.
As Clive said, we saw really the potential to unshackle the project a little bit and see if there's a better way to engineer this and to do some additional drilling. We've decided to optimize the existing feasibility and put it out in Q1 of next year. If you go, just slide 24 just shows some pictures of what's happening at all of our sites. I'm not going to talk too much about that, but let's go to slide 25. I talked a little bit about this in the introduction. Continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is what happens day to day on the mine site that really the public doesn't get to see, which really drives our ounce profiles and makes sure that we continue to meet our targets without having slip-ups.
If you've looked at us over quarter on quarter on quarter on quarter, you'll see that the operational team at all the sites, this is something they really work on, and this is something that they're really proud of, and the fact that every quarter they continue to make improvements and meet their quarterly targets. If you look at Fekola Mine, out here we've been doing things like a fleet management system. We finished construction of the heavy mining equipment workshop. We talked a little bit about a solar plant previously. This is a 30 MW solar plant. That hybrid solar plant is considered to be one of the biggest hybrid solar plants in Africa. We've now got, because we have some of the bigger trucks, the 200-ton trucks, we've got a simulator on site to make sure that our equipment is used properly and most efficiently.
At Masbate, they're doing a big tailings facility expansion, a raise. Probably more important, for the last couple of years, they've been working at two major pits, that being Montana and Main Vein. We're starting now to get ready for the next couple of years to make the next jump to the next couple of pits, and that includes a resettlement plan at Blue Quartz and Old Lady. At Otjikoto, they have a fleet management system. We continue to refine that. Really for them, it's now moving from an open pit operation as we finish up in the Wolfshag pit to eventually bringing this project underground. I talked briefly about the safety management, obviously, looking at environmental, the social sustainability, looking at improvements in both management and monitoring.
Really on COVID-19, I'll talk maybe a little bit more about this when we get into the ESG side. On COVID-19, we've now been doing this, as you know, we identified this in February of 2019. Sorry, 2020. We're now well over a year into this. We're starting to look at all the sites as how do we come out of COVID? What happens next? We've grown accustomed to this living apart together scenario, but we really want to get back to what we do best, and that is interacting and making sure that our teams are together. We're starting to put in place plans to rotate back from this, to come back out of the island configuration, to back to a more traditional mining configuration.
I'm on slide 26 now. I'm not going to spend too much time on this slide because Mike's already hit most of it. Just suffice it to say that even during, now we're in the marathon phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, you can see that still in Q1, we have met or exceeded all three operations, our guidance for the quarter. That's really setting us up. Mike talked a little bit about this H1, H2, where we're heavily weighted to H2, the second half of the year. It was really important that we get everything all in place in Q1 and Q2. I can say that despite some of these issues related to COVID and some of the political situations around the world, the sites continue to perform, and we're really lined up for a really great second half of the year.
Now, if you go to slide 27, what's happening in 2021? We talked a little bit about it, the Fekola mill, it's really about cranking that mill up and optimizing it to see what the maximum throughput is. I'll talk a little bit in the next couple of slides about the different opportunities we have. We basically have several hard rock sources now, which will be the Fekola pit and the Cardinal pit, but we're rolling into the potential to also add in satellite. Satellite is almost like a free carry on the front half of the Fekola mill, and we're only limited by how much we can put through the back half. Talking to John and Randy, we're talking about an additional 10%-15% throughput when we put the satellite in.
Now we're in the process of really seeing how much can this thing do as a mixture. We'll talk extensively about the Cardinal resource, and I already told you we're taking the bulk sample. The Anaconda Project, there's a very extensive slide. We're going to spend a lot of time on that in just a couple of slides. The Otjikoto Mine, the Gramalote Project as we continue to optimize the feasibility through this year. Going to slide 28. As I promised, here's something on the Cardinal region or on the Cardinal area, 500 m west of the Fekola pit. What you see here, this is a project that Randy Reichert and I are working on. What you see here is that they've identified an inferred resource of more than 600,000 ounces. Okay? Let that sink in a little bit, 600,000 ounces.
This has a very small satellite component, which we're pulling out as part of the bulk sample, and we're getting ready to put into the mill. After that, you've got a hard rock source. The hard rock source, the grade, as you see in the resource, is 1.54 g per ton. This really is going to allow us some kind of optionality as we go forward, because as you've seen in 2020, as we move up and down through the Fekola pit, you get into areas which are maybe a little bit lower grade, then you get into higher grade. This will have the potential, especially with the additional capacity, to feed additional ounces into the mill. We've included some of this in our life of mine plans that I'll show here at the end of the slides.
There is the potential, given the fact that we've got additional capacity in the mill, to even ratchet that up a little bit more. Additionally, if we get higher grade material at Menankoto or if we get higher throughput, we could actually see that this could extend the life of mine a little bit as we go forward. Okay, I'm on slide 29 now. This is one of the key slides of this presentation. We spent a lot of time, I think, over the last three or four years trying to be coy about this project and trying really not to give too much information about where this project was located. When we talked to investors and analysts, we didn't talk about the fact that it was within trucking distance of Fekola. We didn't say that it was north of Fekola.
For a while, we didn't mention the licenses at all, the names of the licenses. That was primarily because of the artisanal mining aspect inside of Mali, and so we were very coy about it. Recently, because of the permit dispute with the government, we decided really to explain to everybody what's going on, because it's important to see how we see a way forward here. If you look at what we call the Anaconda Project, it actually consists of two licenses. You've got Bantako North and you've got Menankoto Sud. If you look, there's two boxes on there. Within those two boxes, there's some circles. Those circles, you may have often heard the geologists really love to do this, to talk about exploration at the snakes. You might have heard Anaconda, you may have heard Mamba or Adder.
These were all targets that were within those two license areas that they continued to drill on. We kind of interchangeably have talked maybe about the snakes, maybe about Anaconda, maybe about Menankoto. What you really need to understand is the Anaconda Project contains two licenses with a bunch of pits which are named after snakes. Okay? It's only the Menankoto license which is in dispute right now with the government. Basically, Clive did a pretty good job of explaining at the beginning. We legally had the right to ask for a one-year extension on the Menankoto license with the intent of putting this thing into production in 2022. We believe that an administrative error was made within the Ministry of Mines, and that license was granted to somebody else.
We challenged that, through basically the Prime Minister issuing an administrative decree, that result was overturned a couple of weeks ago. That license was pulled back from the company that it was given to in Mali. At the time it was pulled back, we were in the process of basically confirming that that license would be given to us. Obviously, with the political situation here right now, we're waiting to see as a government is formed, what they do. We still believe that that license legally belongs to us and that it will come to us. With that being said, we still have optionality because if you look at, in particular, the Bantako North Zone, which is not under dispute, that license is clearly ours. You can see that there's a pit there, the Mamba pit, which basically is almost exclusively on the Bantako pit.
It just works out that within this Anaconda Project, that's one of the highest area saprolites that we've uncovered. We're currently in the process of developing a mining plan, once again, that's Randy Reichert, and an ESIA, which would allow us basically to submit that document to the government. We're calling it a phase 1 study because it really is a trucking study down to the Fekola mill. We're going to finish that in Q3 of this year and submit it with the full intent of going through all the permitting. It's important you understand that this is a separate license, so we have to go through all the permitting. That's why we're not saying we're putting it in production in Q4.
In the slides not only on what we've discovered in these areas, but also what could potentially come as we finish to drill off Menankoto. What I will tell you is that we also believe that while we have the trucking study, and we're going to implement that in 2022, we still believe that there's a significant sulfide resource or a hard rock resource within this area. We're kind of scheduling right now for the second half of 2022 also to come out with the initial resource on the hard rock side of it, which would then give us some optionality. Would you, in fact, truck that?
We don't know, because we don't know the grade yet down to Fekola, because it would have to be pretty high grade to replace the Fekola grade, or would you in fact build a separate mill right there in this area? We believe that we'll be kicking that study off in the second half of 2022. Looking at slide 30. This is the Wolfshag underground development. We've talked about this a little bit already. The fact of the matter is this is allowing us to kind of increase to in the neighborhood of 200,000 ounces per year, for the next four years, that's 2022 through 2025. This project, despite COVID, remains on schedule. We believe that we will be pulling ore out of there in Q1 in 2022. To date, we've developed more than 600 m of access into this.
This is starting in 2022, we're looking at approximately 50,000 a year pulling it, and that's an average, that's plus minus, out of the underground, and the methodology is long hole stoping. Going to the next slide. We always talk about this kind of four-year underground resource. The reality is we have an inferred resource down plunge, the Wolfshag down plunge extension. The geologists have done a very good job of hitting this thing from the surface, but that's not the best use of capital, and it's maybe not the best way to drill out this resource. We've worked with them to prepare an exploration drift, which basically at the bottom of the Wolfshag underground development will pull out, and at the end of 2021, they'll be able to start hitting this target from underground.
Certainly it'll be much cheaper and more efficient. We certainly see a potential not only to, as I said, to the four years, we could see some additional life from the Wolfshag down plunge extension. Just real quick, this kind of purple area or this pink area, I know Tom's going to talk a little bit about it. It's very early days. I can't really talk about what it means for mining. What I can tell you is that for us, if you've got to find something underground, given the fact that we've already done all of the initial development for the underground, just visually, you can see that this is not too far off of the underground, and without much difficulty, you could see us spinning down into this area if there's any potential for additional resource there and grabbing that area.
That's one to watch from the mining side. I'm on slide 32, turning my attention to the Gramalote project. This one Clive already alluded to. This one was maybe for us, not as exciting. The results when we got the results in May, they were a little bit unexpected. The next slide will really explain why that happened. This slide basically compares the PEA, which we did at the beginning of 2021, which has both inferred and indicated in it. It compares it to the feasibility study. What you can see is really while the economics pass our hurdle for construction, we felt that when we looked at it, that there's a very real potential that we could optimize it.
If you go to slide 33, a lot of people, of course, when the results came out, they were asking, "How did you get worse results?" It's really important to understand the process. When we took over management from AGA at the beginning of 2020, they had already finished a PFS, which the PEA was based on. They had done an ESIA and actually pulled a construction permit. The ESIA and construction permit allowed them basically to immediately start construction. We didn't want to upset that process, what we decided with AGA was that we would not spend a lot of time doing value engineering on it. We would take their design, and we would apply it just to Gramalote Ridge, just the one area of the license, and we would do a feasibility study on that.
The key things that came out of that was, one, we had less ounces. This is a result of only working on Gramalote Ridge. There were some changes in the pit slope based on the way we had set up and the way we'd actually operate. It was also the big thing was that we can only use indicated material. I think it's important to acknowledge that the drilling program was extremely successful, bringing more than 90% or approximately 90% of the resource into the indicated category for the Gramalote Ridge. There were some increases in costs. Those were related to fuel, electricity, and labor, but those are things that we couldn't control. Those were real market surveys which came back, and those were the numbers. The last thing which changed was there were some infrastructure changes, infrastructure costs.
Of course, anytime that you delay things like there's a resettlement there's some working with artisanal miners. Every year that you delay those, and they know that there's a project coming, the costs go up. So those costs did go up during the study. What we did is we looked at it and we said, "Okay, how did this happen? And should we kind of now step back and take a good hard look at what has happened?" What we saw is we saw a project that if we had really developed it from kind of first principles as engineers and as geologists, we thought that there was some real potential for changes.
We looked at the model and said, "Can we get back to kind of what that original PEA numbers were?" We basically came up with a concept that we thought we could. Really that involved four areas. One, we had to come back and drill some more. That was not only drilling some of the remaining inferred in Gramalote Ridge, this was actually stepping out in two other areas, Trinidad and Monjas, that we're trying to put a drilling program on. We also saw that there was some real potential for value engineering. I'll just use one example. Basically, there's a river that goes right through the pit, and it's put into a tunnel where it goes through a mountain, and then it's spit out the other side of the mountain, and then down into a major waterway.
That structure itself, originally during the PEA, was just almost a concept, very high-level engineering. When we got into it, we realized that this was really quite a significant event. We thought there was the potential, instead of putting it into a tunnel, that maybe we could just blast a channel. We could basically channelize it, and we could actually use that channel as potentially as a power source. Another example is the fact that the personnel camp is on one side of a major highway with a mine and mill on the other side. In order to do that, the government was requiring a major overpass, a civil project to keep people and vehicles from going on the highway. We're now looking at potentially adjusting the camp and moving it on the same side of the highway.
Those things don't sound like a lot, but when you're talking about potentially changing your environmental impacts and social impacts in Colombia, that absolutely requires us to look at do you then have to go back and open up your environmental permit. We're in the process now of doing the optimization and seeing, does it make sense to open up the ESIA, or do we just keep it the way it is right now? The other two things that we have left to do there, of course, we have to continue to maintain our social license to operate, and that includes those two things I talk about, advancing the resettlement and the artisanal mining solution. We also have to keep things that are on the critical path moving forward.
One of the long lead items there is to bring an overhead power line in the site. We want to keep that moving. There is a hydro station which is on site, which has to be moved. We're working through that. All of those four things, we have approved a budget. We provided that budget to AGA, and they're currently in the process of evaluating our work and discussions with them is they've got to decide what they want to do with that. These last two slides, I'm on slide 35 now. These last two slides are really, for me, interesting. This slide right here, the slide 35, this was the previous five-year gold production. I think we showed this at the AGM last year. We certainly showed it at Investor Days, and we were pretty happy with the slide.
It showed us maintaining production really kind of between that 800 ounces and 1,000 ounces a year range for the next five years. We had Gramalote coming in in 2024. We had some interesting questions. Everyone kept asking us, "What's happening out in 2022? Why is there a dip there?" That dip is purely a result of the mine plans, in particular at Fekola. Once again, remember I said we're going up and down through the high grade. In 2022, the mine sequencing really didn't allow us to bring any ounces forward when we did the optimization. We always said at that time, "Give us a little bit of time." Certainly, as you do your budgets and you do your mine planning going forward, the resolution gets better and better, and you're able to bring ounces forward.
Now if you look at slide 36, you can see that we've done exactly that, right. This is what is in our 2020 life of mines. Sorry, 2021 life of mines, the ones that we're just coming out with right now. What you're seeing here is not only have we increased or we've gotten that dip out of 2022, we have a great profile across all five years, which basically puts us well above 900,000 ounces for all three of our operations. If you look at including Calibre in those, we're basically at 1 million ounces. This is important. There's some important things which are in the footnotes and in the bullets down the side. This does include some Cardinal. Remember, that's an inferred resource. It includes Gramalote, but it's moved out to 2025 now.
That right now, remember, we're optimizing, so we don't have the feasibility study done on that, but that's our best guess. It does not include, as I talked about, this whole Menankoto or this whole Anaconda situation. If you look at Anaconda, it doesn't include anything from Menankoto, which we certainly see when they confirm we get the license back to add ounces. It doesn't include Bantako North, which we know we're already preparing a development plan. It doesn't include anything from the underground extension. It doesn't include anything on Kiaka. This graph is run at 8 million tons per annum. You could see, I've already talked about the potential to go to 8.5 million tons and above. These numbers should absolutely increase as we go forward.
I guess with there, I'd like to stop, and I'll turn it over to Tom, to expand upon what I was talking about as far as the exploration and then other things he's working on. Thank you.
Thank you, Bill. I'm just going to talk a little bit about our exploration programs that are going on around the world right now. As you can see, we have a fairly active program, and we have a pretty good budget for this year. As Clive said, we are looking at $66 million in exploration, of which, and this is going to sound funny, but only $38 million of that is for brownfields exploration around the mines. An additional $27 million is for grassroots exploration, and this is where the guys have been working on these things for many, many years, including, in the case of Uzbekistan, almost 15 years, developing ideas for large projects around the world. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those right now. Before that, I'll give you some of the excitement from Mali.
West Mali, Fekola is located on the Senegal Mali Shear Zone, one of the more prolific gold regions in the world. We started Fekola with, I believe it was 3 million ounces or 4 million ounces. You can see from the exploration we've done, the budgets and the production that Bill's been talking about, we've certainly grown that quite a bit. I'm going to go through some of these. The first one up, this is a long section for Fekola, and you guys have seen this. I've shown the same long section for a number of years, always talking about it's open down plunge, and we really want to get at it. We still really want to get at it.
It's still open down plunge, and some of the holes there, hole 415 below the pit, 3 g over 38 m, 409, 4 g over 30 m, gives you an idea of not only is it well open, but those are really good grades and really good thickness for mining. As I said, I've been talking about it for a number of years. We keep saying we're going to get at it. Unfortunately, we do things like find Cardinal and we find the snakes and we get a little bit distracted. We do plan to get at this this year. We do plan to do some drilling down plunge of Fekola. This is, as I said, wide open. When you look at the size of the structure and the way it goes, there's definitely some size potential still on the structure itself. Next slide, Cardinal.
As Bill talked about, Cardinal is very close to the Fekola pit. I have to admit, we did find it by accident, drilling off an area that was meant to be for waste dumps. That's exploration. Next slide. Bill talked about over a 600,000-ounce inferred resource. Well, when you look at this long section, that inferred resource just covers the pits that you see much higher up. As we've seen with our drilling, there's a series of at least three or four ore shoots that are plunging northwards, they seem to remain open. We've done some drilling this year down plunge and well below our resource pits, and we've had some intersections like hole 557, we had almost 4.3 g over 11 m, and hole 558, where we've had 2.4 g over 24 m.
That's on the right-hand side, on the north side of this, which is well below our existing resource and down plunge. Although Cardinal has a significant resource, we see this as also having, like Fekola, really good potential for an underground mine after the open pit or during the late stages of the open pit. On to the Anaconda region. Our exploration has continued on to the north of the Anaconda. Blue in this is the Bantako license area. You can see from some of these intersections, green being sulfide, oxide being in red. In the printing on the right, you see in Anaconda saprolite on the far north end, we've got hole 39 had 2.7 g over 38 m of saprolite. Hole 44 nearby had 2 g over 40 m in sulfides.
This, again, is well beyond the existing resource area and the existing exploration area that the engineers are looking at. We believe the Anaconda area has significant potential to grow well beyond where we are today. Our exploration focus so far this year in this project has been predominantly in the Bantako area following Mamba North. This slide shows the boundary between Bantako and Menankoto, and you can see in the slide on the right-hand side, the bulk of the mineralization in Mamba and the bulk of the good mineralization in Mamba is actually on the Bantako license to the north and remains open to the north and actually very open to the north. We continue to follow it northwards with our ongoing drilling programs. We're, I have to say, pretty excited about the size potential of this area. On to Otjikoto.
As Bill was saying, you can see the underground development on Wolfshag here. This is just a plan view of the same thing that he was showing you, showing the OTG-23 zone off to the east. This year we've been focused on, almost exclusively this year with our drill program. You can see, we've got almost 20,000 m planned. We've drilled 8,000 m so far. You can see some of the intersections in this area. They're not the 50 m or 60 m thick intersections of Fekola. Hole 574, we got 4 g over 12.6 m. Hole 539, we got 4 g over 21 m. We're seeing a zone that's in the sort of 10 m to 20 m thickness with grades upwards of between 3 g-5 g. A very significant zone, given it's right beside an existing underground development plan.
We're pretty excited about it. Don't know the size potential yet. It's still very early on. It was something we just found last year. Drill planning is ongoing with that, and we hope to, when we start drilling Wolfshag underground, that we're going to be able to combine that with some underground drilling on the OTG-23 zone. Right now, we continue to drill it from surface. One of my more favorite subjects, our grassroots exploration program, especially Otjikoto. Not Otjikoto, Uzbekistan. Roger and I first went to Uzbekistan over 15 years ago, during the Bema days, to talk to them about doing exploration on some of the ground around their major discoveries. The Tien Shan Gold Belt, which is part of what Uzbekistan covers, is one of the most prolific gold belts in the world, bar none.
You can see in the next slide, just near our licenses, you have things like Muruntau, 150 million ounces. 150 million ounces. They produce 2 million ounces a year. That's within a stone's throw of the licenses we've just recently acquired, which are covered areas in and around these existing deposits. We've just started drilling this year. We did some surface sampling last year and soil sampling last year, and we're now in our second diamond drill hole on one of our targets, and we've been doing RC drilling from the beginning of this year. This is one of our more exciting early-stage exploration programs, and it's an example of being very, very patient in this business. You don't just walk in sometimes and find what you want. Sometimes it takes a long time, and this is definitely an example of that, and we're very proud of it.
Another one of our grassroots targets is in Finland. We're right beside the Ikkari discovery by Rupert Resources. The geology of the Rupert Resources discovery and some of the soil and near-surface glacial till anomalies from that license extend onto our license. We've been waiting to drill this for some time now. We're in the final stages of permitting, and we expect when freeze-up comes, we'll be able to start follow-up drilling in the area immediately down or immediately along strike from this zone. We do have some good anomalies in the area worth following up, and we believe we've got some decent potential in this area. Another example of our or the fruits of our early-stage exploration efforts and being patient with government people and the people you're dealing with is in Egypt. We've recently been awarded the Barameya license in Central Egypt.
It's an area that's seen production since the time of the Pharaohs. We're in the final stages of negotiating the final terms of the license with the government, we hope to be able to start exploration on this project later on this year. With that, I'd like to say thank you very much to everybody here, a special thanks to our crews, our exploration crews, but everybody this year who's, last year and a half, have certainly sacrificed well beyond everything to keep continuing with our exploration and our mining, I'd like to say a big thanks to them. With that, I'll pass you on to Bill again. Thank you.
I'd like to talk a little bit about ESG. Typically, when we do this presentation on ESG, it's really almost like a celebration of all the fun stuff we've had to do, we've gotten to do at each of the sites. This year, we decided to maybe go a little bit heavier. I apologize for that. I know we're at the end of the presentation. I think that there is some information really people, the investors and shareholders should know that we're doing, which is really out there on the front of ESG. With that, I'll kick it off. This is just our philosophy, that we're required to play a key role in sustainable development wherever we're at. We see it as the third leg of the tripod with you've got industry and government, you've got the communities.
We believe we take a unique approach, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of that. I'm on slide 53 now. I guess I want to start out, it just I think it was today or yesterday, we announced our fifth publishing of our Responsible Mining Report, Raising the Bar. We get so much feedback on this, positive feedback where people really feel like it, that it really lets them know what we do on ESG. This year, we've actually linked it into our website. There's an interactive version. I would encourage everybody to go in and have a look at it. What that is, it's really a repository of everything ESG.
I'll tell you, while there are a lot of feel-good stories in there, it also has a lot of detail on where we comply, and if there's a situation where we think we could have done better, we're very cards on the table, and we're happy to show where we could improve. So we do, in fact, report to the Global Reporting Initiative Standards and the Mining and Metals Sector Disclosures. A lot of good information there. Going to slide 54. One of the things that we often get asked when we're out talking to people, investors or shareholders, is, "You're working in some of these maybe not as developed countries, and do you, in fact, get to skip the environmental standards and not worry about it because no one's watching?" The answer is a resounding no as far as what we require from a corporation.
We align with basically all the best practices in industries, this includes the ICMM principles, certainly the IFC Performance Standards. I think everyone's aware we have Robin Weisman, who used to be with the IFC and recently came onto our board. If you look at all of the ISO standards, we comply with those. We also, this year, have joined the World Gold Council. We're in the process of auditing and complying with the Responsible Gold Mining Principles. On slide 55, this is a bit of a victory lap slide, and I think Clive mentioned this a little earlier on. Despite COVID in 2020, if you look at what we've done, two very prestigious international awards, the PDAC Sustainability Award, and that really related to the resettlement that we did here in Mali. I'm going to maybe just deviate from the slides here.
That is very special to me in the sense that when we came here, that was not something that was mandatory. That was something that we decided as a company was in the best interest of not only us but of the community. They actually thought that they would be better off sitting right next to the project. They thought that there would be more economic opportunity. After extensive consultation with them, we agreed that they were going to move about 4 km away. We created a village that moved more than 3,000 people and put solar power into each of the houses and brought running water to more access points within the village. It's something that is really a calling card for B2 in this part of the world.
It's been shown to many of the government officials that have come out here, and they're just really blown away by what we've done. We also won The Mining Journal's 2020 Most Sustainable Miner Award. This was a very interesting award because it was more over the body of work that we had done in 2019. It really revolved around the four pillars that we espouse when we do our CSR or our ESG activities. That being public health and education, development of livelihood, and of course, the environmental component with things like the Rhino Gold Bar Initiative.
Even within each of the regions where we work, and we've just listed a couple here, but like in Mali, we won a couple awards, and in Namibia, we won an award for environmental, and in Colombia, even though it's a development project, you can see we've won awards. Really, it's become a bit of a calling card as far as our CSR and our sustainability work. I'm going to go to slide 57 now. Slide 57 is talking about occupational health and safety. I talked a little bit about it. We've had an amazing run, but it's not one of those things Health and safety doesn't rest when you think you've got it all figured out. It's something you have to work at. It's a craft that you have to work at every day.
When you look at our numbers down in that table on the left, you see that our numbers have improved quite dramatically. You can't just assume that that's going to keep carrying on. What we've done is we've started looking at what are the next steps. Each and every shift, we talk about people trying to get home safe. If you go to slide 58, this is really some of the things that we're talking about in 2021. As I said, we continue, all of our sites have amazing lost time frequency rates. You look at Masbate, that's like three years, almost three years, I think it's between two and three years of not having any lost time accidents. The Fekola plant, the Wolfshag Underground, those are development projects where you typically see people get hurt.
We've gone, knock on wood, without an injury at both of those sites. If you look at what we're doing on the right-hand side, it really revolves around coming back to our grassroots, making sure that all of the safety procedures and the programs are in place, making sure that all of the supervisors are ensuring that all of our workers are in the right place at the right time with the right equipment. Talking about slide 59. This is the COVID-19 slide. Clive mentioned this, the fact that we spent a significant amount of money really supporting not only the government, but the communities where we work, making sure that we didn't just forget about the fact that there was a whole economy around us, which was being upturned because of COVID.
We looked at not only, do we look at medical supplies, but we also looked at things like sanitation and hygiene. We made sure that the doctors had PPE. As Clive said, probably one of the most interesting ones is we reached back into Vancouver, our home region, and supported community programs that were not getting the funding because as COVID hit, people kind of withdrew their extra money that they were able to spend on things like food programs and mental health. Across all of our operations and our home organization, we spent a significant amount of money. As I said earlier, really, what are we looking at now? Now it's a return to work. Now it's trying to make life back to normal.
We've been assisting both on the mine sites and in the communities where we work on making sure people are vaccinated. We're making sure that as we come back out, that all of our procedures still protect all of our workers in the community. We're just trying to get back to whatever's the new normal. I'm going to go to slide 61 now on our communities. I put this slide together, and this is not something I normally do. Normally, you don't talk about how much do you spend, right? Because it's not necessarily about really bragging about how much you spend. It's what kind of impacts you make. It's really when you think about what happened during COVID, right? As I said, during COVID, many organizations were pulling back, and all of the communities really needed help.
We really put forth an effort spending, which is a lot of money for us, $14.4 million across our platform to make sure that the communities had the opportunity to develop in those four areas I talked about earlier. If you look at slide 62, I'm just going to go through This is the fun stuff that I always talk about. If you look at slide 62 in Mali, we're doing some very cool things here. We have this community development plan here now, which maybe for the first time in this part of western Africa. The community's been involved in deciding what they want us to spend our money on. We sat down with them, and for us, some of them we didn't consider to be major projects, but for them, they were life-changing projects.
Things like even just putting a well into a village where we didn't know they needed it. They developed the basic community development plan, then we laid over on top of that some really regional changing projects. The first one, that three-year UNICEF partnership project is really one that's absolutely amazing. That's a partnership with UNICEF, where we're going into these artisanal mining sites, where basically you have women and children working alongside of men in very dangerous and hard conditions, and we're looking at, can we get support for those that are most vulnerable? Can we get it so the children can get an education? Can we make sure that the women have the ability to take care of their kids in these very rough conditions? It's an amazing project with UNICEF.
We've also looked at food security in this part of the world, and so we're in the process of developing this agricultural business community development project, and it's this really kind of a vertically integrated agricultural process where we're talking about potentially providing enough opportunities that you could really, if people didn't want to do artisanal mining or some of these other more dangerous activities, they could get involved in this and really change their lives. The last one on this slide is just this AFAC project, which is a joint venture with the Canadian government, where we have basically looked at training people, not at the kind of PhD or bachelor's level, which kind of always the sexy projects. This is the artisanal workers, this is the electricians, these are the bricklayers. These are the people that are really needed to build an infrastructure in an economy.
We set up this training center in the regional center, not too far away from here, 50 km, and we've brought in more than 1,000 local residents already that have been trained through there. Just going to Masbate. I probably got to pick up the pace or we'll be here all night. Looking at Masbate, I'm not going to go through all these projects, but I will tell you, Masbate, they have an amazing ability to create small projects with the community. There, you're required to create this social development management plan with the community. That is basically part of your budget every year. The communities in which we work, they have to approve the projects, what you're doing. Just in one year, in 2020, more than 200 projects were developed and funded.
These include small projects, but there's also big things like community water system. If you followed us at all and followed any of our Masbate CSR work, we always talk about this coastal management plan where we're putting down these coral reef balls, bringing a coral area, a coral reef right next to the mine site back to life. We've also, along the shoreline, planted more than 1.4 mangrove trees. As this thing changes, we're really changing nature, which was destroyed by illegal fishing and illegal mining back to what it used to be. We continue on in education and health and safety programs as well. Looking at Namibia. Namibia, the first one I think we talked a lot about last year, and if you came early, you saw the video. Really, an amazing success story of this Namibian Rhino Gold Bar.
Basically, we donated 1,000 ounces of gold. In exchange, we sold those with a small premium, a 15% premium. That money is being used to not only support rhino conservation, it's really being used to support the communities where rhino conservation is occurring. So it's more of a livelihood project where we're actually helping the communities do something that they love, do something they've historically always done, and at the same time, protecting the rhinos. We're working with UNICEF again in Namibia. This is on an education program for young people. The Little Shop of Physics, that's a project that I actually started way back when I was in Namibia. That's basically bringing physics concepts into the community using basic things to teach the principles of physics. Of course, additional, we do all schools there, we do internships programs there, we do scholarship programs.
Really a large gamut of projects. If you talk about our three operational projects, you can't think that we basically wait until we start operations and do CSR projects. Even in Gramalote, we've gotten a lot of buy-in from the community as we work towards doing things like formalizing artisanal mining. Artisanal mining is considered an illegal activity in Colombia, but it's something that a lot of people do. The government has decided to make that a much more formalized process where you can actually become legal doing it and make a profit. We're in the process of helping them do that. We're working on resettlement issues. As I said, really, the community now has been waiting on this for quite a long time, and they really want to get on with it.
We're also working on these small to medium enterprises and how do we make sure that livelihoods, if you don't want to work within the mining community, how do you earn a living? Now, I'm just going to go very quickly through the environmental responsibility. I'm going to start on slide 67. This is, as I said, some of this stuff is maybe a little drier than it normally is because we're being asked things like, "What are you doing on the environmental side?" Or, "What are you doing related to climate risk?" Okay, on climate risk, we've developed a climate risk management strategy. What we're in the process now of, we're assessing our carbon footprint. It's funny because now, all of the rest of the world has caught up to what we're doing.
It was five or six years ago, we were at the front of the tip of the spear when we put in a hybrid solar plant in Namibia. Now everybody's doing it. We did it. We did a 7.5 MW in Namibia, other people did it. We said, "Okay, let's see if you can match us now." We did 30 MW in Fekola. We're on the front edge. Our plan really is to finish up calculating our carbon footprint this year and put together a full carbon reduction plan starting in 2022. If I go to slide 68. Across, just so everyone's aware, we didn't have any significant fines or sanction at any of our sites in 2021. We did have one incident where we had a water dam over top at Otjikoto.
Across all of our sites, despite COVID, despite being an island configuration where we had trouble getting people in and out, we continued to improve on things like rehabilitation, on waste rock dump design, even things like, because we're in Africa, fugitive dust. All of these things, continuous improvement has continued to occur. Now I'm going to go to tailings management. I'm going to be on slide 70. In the last couple of years, tailings management has really come to the forefront of mining, and people want to know, are you complying with international best practices? I can say without hesitation that absolutely, we are at the front edge of tailings management. We have added specific to B2Gold, our own tailings management procedures. This procedure aligns with the Mining Association of Canada and the Canadian Dam Association.
While we don't explicitly, so everyone talks about this Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, we believe that we're materially in compliance with that and that basically the only reason we haven't adopted that standard is because they're continuing to develop it, and we want to make sure that they're going in a direction that we feel comfortable with. We felt more comfortable aligning with the Mining Association of Canada standard. I'm going to go to slide 71 now. Looking at tailings some more. Obviously, we spend a lot of time and a lot of money monitoring our facilities and making sure that they're in the best shape that they can be. We have annual inspections by qualified engineers of record. We have third-party independent audits which come on at a minimum of every five years. Obviously, if the risk is higher, we'll do it more often.
We have all of the requisite management oversight people within the organization to include a tailings engineer, a corporate tailings engineer, the. We have an accountable executive officer, which is me. I am answerable directly to the CEO and the board on tailings issues. We obviously have to report at least annually, and normally we do it twice a year to our subcommittee on health, safety, and environment related to tailings issues. With that, I'm going to turn it back over because I'm done with my slides.
Thanks, everyone. We're just going to take a couple minutes or a few seconds, I can see, to set up for Q&A so people can follow with any questions. While we wait for that, I just want to cover a couple of points. A couple things that with all that interest with you and Bill was talking about, there are some great videos, as many of you are aware, some of them will be shown today on our website.
Really, we're looking at high-quality videos that tell wonderful stories about the things that we do in our communities. Bill mentioned the Responsible Mining Report . It's a tremendous document. A lot of work goes into it with a lot of people, and I think it just really underlines the commitment that we all have to be responsible and great document, and we're very proud of it. Once again, very proud of this year's. I just want to clarify something I said before, because I realize I talked about the votes for the directors, but I didn't clarify as to why there were some differences. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but if you can indulge me for a little bit, I think it's important. Some of our directors have been with the company for over 10 years.
A number of them, including myself, were actually founding directors, and in my case, a CEO. Bob Gayton and Bob Cross and Jerry Korpan have been with us since they were founding directors of the company. Some shareholders, some institutional shareholders, and maybe some others, really just want to put us all in a box, and there's a box and there's rules for the box. I always said, and it was my father who always said to me, "All people that generalize are wrong." Judge us for what we do and who we are, hold us accountable, look at our company in isolation. Don't try and fit us into a box. One of the boxes is that some of the institutions believe that you should refresh your board after 10 years.
Part of the thinking is that after 10 years or more, Jerry and Robert and Bob are just so thankful and grateful to me that they're just beholden to anything I want them to do. They've lost their independence as directors. It's almost humorous. At the end of the day, these are really highly experienced directors who have been through the growth of this company from zero gold production to 1 million ounces a year, supporting management, and being there for advice and support, and they are highly experienced. Why would you want to lose highly experienced directors who still want to be directors and bring all this experience?
Why would you want to have them leave the board and put in somebody less experienced because some shareholders think, "Oh, well, those people are going to be independent and hold Clive and the team to task." Well, we're more than happy to be accountable any day, anytime to our shareholders, to institutional shareholders, to our employees. I find that as a very silly thing, and that's why these gentlemen got 75% of the vote versus some of us who got a lot higher percentage of the vote. I'm surprised I didn't get 75% because I'm a director, too, and I've been here forever. I just wanted to point that out, and I just think for some of these institutions who have 20-somethings in the back room who are crunching numbers and coming up with policy. I mean, come on.
I think we've got to be a little more accountable. They need to be a bit accountable as well, some of the institutions. They also want to limit the number of boards that directors can be on, which I do agree with. Back in the crazy days here in town, you had guys on 12 boards. That's just silly. A lot of greed involved there. At the end of the day, they want to limit us severely to two boards that you can be on. Therefore, they want some of them to lose experienced directors who are still very relevant. For what? We can't get other experienced directors because they're probably on two boards. Less experienced people. Doesn't make any sense to me.
At the end of the day, we have a great board of directors, and as I said, a number of them have been founding directors of this really successful company. I just want to make a point that I wanted to make about COVID earlier. I've got to start writing some stuff down, perhaps. The point is that there's a great opportunity, I think, post-COVID for the gold mining industry and other businesses because when you think about it, we really stepped up and a lot of other companies did as well, and continue to mine safely in these countries where it's just critical to do that for the continued benefit to the economies, people, all these issues that we did. I think there's a great opportunity now because we can go anywhere in the world to the countries we're already in or to Uzbekistan or other countries.
We can say, "Hey, this is what we do. This is how we've done it all around the world." Also look at what we did during COVID. We were a key industry, and we kept people safe. We helped with COVID, and we kept these jobs, and we kept paying taxes. We kept contributing. I think there's a great opportunity to show people around the world that the mining industry's changed. There's a lot of responsible companies out there today. We need to get some people over the hump about mining as a dangerous practice. There are so many good things happening in mining. You've seen a lot of them here, and many other companies are doing it.
I look forward to going around the world when we can and talking to governments where we work but where we don't, and saying the Philippines is actually already changing some of their laws to attract more foreign investment, having seen how good mining has been after a bad history in that country, how mining has been, and we're a big part of that. I think there's a wonderful opportunity to go around the world and say we want to work with governments. It's a joint venture with the government of Pakistan, for example, but show them what we've done and show them particularly what we've done during COVID, because these are great stories.
Maybe we can finally get people to realize that the mining industry has a lot of positive things happening, a lot of great job developments, a lot of great reclamation work, as we've seen, a lot of great social programs, environmental protection projects. It was Bill Lytle that said years ago with our group that this is not your grandfather's mining company. It's much better than that. Your grandfather's mining company wasn't a great company that cared a lot about shareholders or local people or the environment, frankly speaking. Let's change it a lot. We need to get the world to realize this is a good industry. If there's a green mining company, I think we're it, frankly, and I think there's others. As I said earlier, some are doing it because they have to.
We've done it for a long time, and some others because it's the right thing to do. Finally, before questions, I just want to thank everybody. Obviously, with what we've been able to accomplish in 2020 and during COVID, it amazes me to see what we've accomplished and what we do around the world, and how people have faced the challenges of COVID and the regular challenges we face every day trying to mine gold 24 hours a day around the world. Thank you to our great board of directors, our remarkable executive team, and all the various groups that make this happen, from exploration, development, legal, accounting, the operations people, the environmental people, et cetera. Very proud to be, again, this year, the president of this remarkable company.
All of the governments in the countries we work, the great relationships we have and the mutual trust and respect, and all of the other stakeholders that help us do what we do. Thank you for that, and I will now see if there's any questions that we can answer. If you don't want to ask a question now, you can submit a question by email and the appropriate person will answer it.
Clive, I do have a question from Ovais Habib at Scotiabank, an analyst who covers us. He was asking how we've operated so well in all these various jurisdictions. He's asking, how has B2 maintained guidance through COVID as well as the coup that took place in Mali? What's different about B2's culture that the team does so well in managing political risk and security risk in these various countries?
Well, that's an Ovais question. There's three or four parts to it. Ovais is a very good mining analyst who's covered us for quite a long time, and been on many trips to our sites. There's a whole bunch of stuff to unpack there. I do think we probably touched on quite a few of those things there. Guidance, et cetera, well, that's discipline. That's about discipline, and that's what we talked about a lot, and every day continuing to perform. That's the combination of exploration success, accretive acquisitions in terms of growing the company over time. The culture, well, I think we talked a lot about that, and that's one of the things we're most proud of, is not just what we do in the world and what we do in terms of being a profitable company, but the way that we do it.
I think, Ovais, I can answer more of that probably in detail. Feel free to give me a call. I think we touched on a lot of the things in your question during the presentation.
There is a part two. This also comes from Ovais, but it's related to capital allocation. He's asking, well, he's pointing out that we have one of the highest dividend yields in the business. The meat of his question is, what are the capital allocation plans for the future, especially if Gramalote is given the green light in 2022?
You want me to have a stab at that, Mike, or do you want to go ahead?
You can go. You're good.
Okay. Just correct me if I'm wrong. Actually, don't add to it and make it look like you're not correcting me. I think we touched on this as well, but it's a good question. Obviously, the vast majority, I think, of our shareholders, who seem to like what we're doing, given the votes today, the vast majority of our shareholders want us to continue to grow the company. That's kind of what we've done and what we've been for 13 years. I think there's a lot of them want to continue that, but while we pay a dividend at the same time. That's the balance we're looking for strategically going forward, the ability to do that. We've got a very healthy dividend, as Ovais points out now. We're not looking in the near term at increasing that.
We've got to see what's happening with Gramalote, Bantako, Cardinal, all the various things we're working on and some of the other opportunities to see our cash requirements over time. There's going to be a continued balance. I think the majority of our shareholders want us to continue to grow. That's why a lot of them own it, for the dividend and for the growth. There are a group of shareholders, fortunately, I think they're the minority, who they seem to want us to grow the company without spending any money. I haven't figured that one out yet, because to build gold mines, you need to spend some money. I'm being a bit facetious, but we've had those conversations. If anybody out there can tell me how to continue to grow this company with spending no money, I'm all ears. We're always willing to listen to ideas.
That's all the questions we have for now.
Okay. Well, hopefully, it's been an interesting session. Thank you all again. Really hope we can do this together next year. Thank you. Stay safe.