Advancing Strategic Community Investment

Strategic community investment means that the benefits of mining are shared as part of a fair, transparent and participatory process with a prioritization for long-term community development. In this way, our community investment activities both require and help build mutual trust with communities. The guidance was developed in collaboration with site community relations teams, and integrates best practices from internal and external case studies and publications. It includes concepts such as ensuring communities have the opportunity to exercise voice regarding Eldorado’s community investment decisions (in practice, this is being actively achieved in part through Community of Interest Committees) and that community investments should seek to leverage partnerships that favour promoting economic diversification and community self- reliance by helping to build human and institutional capacity.

Our global teams have been hard at work applying these principles in their work over previous years. Efemçukuru continues to successfully implement its strategic “Productive Women, Strong Futures” initiative, while Kışladağ is also proud to partner with Türkiye’s Women-Friendly Brands Platform to deliver their version, called “Women Entrepreneur Vision program.” These programs focus on the social and economic empowerment of local women, while generating broad-based community awareness on gender equality and rural development. Economic empowerment of women is a key development objective in the local contexts, with an aim to address historical socio-cultural barriers that have resulted in lower levels of education and representation of women in the workforce. We believe that a rights-based strategy focused on gender equality and investments in early and ongoing education is a powerful tool for building local capacity and unlocking economic opportunities for local women to contribute to building long-term resilience in their communities.

Similar community investment objectives are shared at the Kassandra Mines, where we are implementing a Community Development Plan and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Community Investment Plan (CIP), as part of our financing requirements from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The Hellas Gold team conducts surveys to better inform its long-term community investment strategy, integrating both the perspectives of local women in the Municipality of Aristotelis, as well as our employees. Since most of our employees are residents of the communities in which we operate, their feedback will help shape more effective strategic decision-making. Hellas Gold has also been hard at work developing and implementing a best practice – KPIs to track community investment inputs, outputs and outcomes, as to ensure progress can be measured for continuous improvement. The team is also investigating opportunities to more deeply involve employees through community investment volunteering activities, much like the Volunteer Squad at Lamaque. There, our strategic community investments aim to address the unique challenge of a local labour shortage. Having employees engaged in the process allows them to contribute to sustainable development in their own community, creating a sense of ownership in helping to make Val-d’Or a better place to live and work.