Social challenge and reasons for project’s initiation

Immediacy of the social problem

Norgold’s social program is implemented in two remote areas in Buryatia, Oka and Muya Districts. In 2018, we started preparations for social project contests in Tynda and Skovorodino Districts of Amur Oblast. 

These four areas are separated by hundreds and thousands of miles yet they have many things in common:

• They are all located in mountainous, hard-to-reach regions. (The Baikal-Amur Railroad is essentially the only transport route available.)
• Severe climate: long and cold winters, short summers, long rain seasons, temperature swings. In many places, you have avalanches, rockfalls and mudslides.
• Tellingly, the government has given all four districts the same benefit status as Arctic territories, even though they are on the same latitude as Samara, Oryol or Penza.
• They are extremely remote even within their regions.
  
  The administrative centers of Skovorodino and Tynda Districts,  the towns of Skovorodino and Tynda, are 500 km and 600 km, respectively, from Blagoveshchensk, the capital of Amur Oblast.
  
  The administrative centers of Muya and Oka Districts, the settlements of Orlik and Taksimo, are 1,000 km and 770 km, respectively, from Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryatia.
• All four districts struggle with depopulation: there are no jobs, practically no health care, utility tariffs are high, and there is little communication with the rest of the world.
• A large part of the local people are unemployed, working in the grey and black sectors of the economy (illegal mining for jade, poaching).

• Some settlements have high crime rates, and a large number of dysfunctional families.
• Population density is extremely low: from 5,900 people in Muya District to 27,000 people in Skovorodino District.
• There are groups of indigenous Arctic people living in Tynda District (1,000 Evenks) and Oka District (3,500 Soyots). Traditionally, Soyots have been living off the famous herds of yak they pasture in the mountains.

External reasons for project’s initiation

Nordgold is a global gold mining company with mines and prospective projects in six countries over four continents: Russia, Kazakhstan, Burkina Faso, Guinea, French Guiana and Canada.

UN Sustainable Development Goals are universal and essentially unique tools applicable across the globe, which help identify priorities and improve people’s lives.

When we talk about UN SDGs, we speak the same language as our stakeholders in West Africa, CIS countries, Europe and both Americas.

Nordgold’s social and environmental programs contribute to 10 out of 17 SDGs:

The social project contest contributes to SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities.

SDG 11 is particularly important to Nordgold because of the role our mines play in West Africa for local settlements’ sustainability. For example, Nordgold annually builds new villages and necessary social infrastructure (schools, mosques, churches, arenas, etc.) for hundreds of people, relocating people into new quality housing from the sites of future mines in Guinea and Burkina Faso. In recent years, we built about 2,000 new houses in Africa.

Nordgold regularly reports on its SDG-oriented programs at international conferences:

• UN Forum on Business and Human Rights (Geneva, Switzerland) – in 2016, 2017 and 2018
• IFC Sustainability Exchange – in 2017, 2018 and 2019
• Annual conferences of the World Association of Mining Lawyers – in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019
• The fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly – in 2019

Internal reasons for project’s initiation

Since 2015, we have been organizing the social project contest in Oka and Muya Districts of Buryatia. We have two mines in these territories: Kholba and Irokinda.

In 2018, we started preparing for a social project contest in Tynda and Skovorodino Districts of Amur Oblast, where Nordgold has a berezite mine. Early in 2019, the contest was launched.

The Company’s three mines and their personnel are interested in a stable and positive social situation in the territories. This was one of the key reasons for initiating the social programs.

Project description

Three reasons why we have picked the format of a social project contest remain unchanged since the beginning.

1. A social project contest engages people as initiators and active participants of projects, identified active citizens as new role models and provides them with resources.
2. Russia has extensive positive experience with social project contests transforming territories and changing people’s mentality. The approach obviously works.
3. Through the social project contest, Nordgold taps into local communities’ own resources. This helps us resolve the problem of our own limited resources. We can implement high-quality social programs without our employees frequently visiting the area. Considering mountainous terrain and the lack of roads, even the distance of a few dozen kilometers may take many hours or even days to cover.

Priority areas for projects:

• Children and teenagers (entertainment opportunities for children and teenagers, including those in dysfunctional families and with medical conditions; talent development; advanced education opportunities; educating youth about the history, culture and geography of their homeland);
• Culture and heritage (supporting elderly people and helping them to remain active; providing creative opportunities; restoring forgotten traditions and crafts; identifying and promoting local sights, legends and sacred places; preserving and developing ethnographic expertise);
• Neighborhood improvements (addressing environmental problems; research into available resources; identifying growth opportunities for towns and settlements; preparing development programs; empowering indigenous minorities; creating and improving websites for towns and settlements, including ethnographic information; circulating innovative technology and best practices among farmers, promoting energy efficiency, alternative sources of power, etc.).

There is an approach known as “asset-based community development”; it is well-known internationally yet little-known in Russia. The idea is that social projects should rely primarily on assets that are available in respective local communities. It is the opposite of the needs-based community development, an approach looking at what is lacking rather than what is available. In a situation where you have a huge number of problems, scarce resources and no idea who and when can make up this deficit, analysis of needs merely keeps you going in a vicious circle.

The question we should be asking is: are there any resources (material or immaterial) that members of the local community can share in order for a social project to be implemented?

In our practice, initiators of minigrant projects don’t ask for their labor to be compensated, even though they spend a large number of hours and days working on them. In other words, they act as volunteers, even though they don’t call themselves that.The “real” budget of a project can be estimated if we convert to money all the volunteer services provided by local people. Our analysis of “real” budgets indicate that local activists contribute three or four times more resources than we do with our 50,000 ruble grants.

Another important concept in “fragile” communities is “fail fast.” You should experiment, try things, and quickly see if a certain area of work does not look promising, so you can switch to something else. This helps you allocate resources sparingly and effeciently.

Stages

February – the contest is announced on local and provincial media and through district administrations. Full terms and conditions, application forms and the list of people invited to the panel of experts were available at local administrations and on their websites.

April – training seminars in the districts. The seminars were conducted jointly by contest operators, Firn Club and Civic Initiative, and Nordgold representatives. Seminars are used to answer frequently-asked questions: how to fill out the application form, how to formulate the mission and goals, how to estimate the social impact, etc.

April 30 – application deadline.

May – Applications are reviewed and graded by a panel of experts, and the winning projects are identified. Experts who were unable to be present at the public presentation of projects sent in their grades in advance in writing.

Key criteria for identifying the winners were the urgency of the problem, whether the implementation team had any prior experience with similar projects and whether the assets contributed by the initiators were commensurate with the goals of the project.

If necessary, expert panels were authorized to go over the 50,000 ruble limit by reallocating funds from other projects.

For example, in Amur Oblast the least costly project was the Baikal-Amur Railroad History project by the Khorogochi club (10,000 rubles).

The costliest project was Special Childhood by Sun Children (220,000 rubles).

May 31 – The winning projects are officially announced.

In Buryatia, the panel of experts included representatives of:

• Nordgold and Buryatzoloto
• Oka District Administration
• Muya District Administration
• Firn Club (contest operator)
• Buryatia Ministry of Natural Resources and Committee for Territorial Development

In Amur Oblast, the 2019 panel of experts included representatives of:

• Nordgold
• Local self-government bodies of Tynda and Skovorodino Districts
• Amur Oblast Public Chamber
• Civil Initiative (contest operator)
• government advisory bodies
• National Popular Front

In Buryatia, 44 project applications were received in Oka and Muya Districts in 2018. Out of this number, 19 projects were selected.

Several social projects in Oka District provided additional opportunities for children’s creative development. For instance, the Burungol School created a Buryat instruments band, and the Orlik Arts School created Buryat dance performances. Also, as part of the drive to restore forgotten crafts and traditions, felting master classes were organized in local villages.

As a result of the contest, new services became available in Muya District.

For example, the daycare center in Taksimo now offers special care and adaptation services for children with special needs.

A project by the Raduga Center offers sewing training session for girls with medical conditions.

Also, our grant helped the local newspaper in Muya launch its website.

In Amur Oblast, we received 45 applications, out of which we funded 20 projects. The total amount requested for projects in Amur Oblast was 3.6 million rubles.

Most of the projects, 22, were in the Culture and Heritage category. The Children and Teenagers category had 18 projects, and the Neighborhood Improvements, 5.

In the village of Ust-Nyukzha, we decided to fund two projects at once. First, the local community center got a new playground for children. It serves the needs of children of all ages and can be used for activities and competitions. The playground was installed by the local residents themselves. Second, the Ust-Nyukzha School used our grant to create a classroom for the native (Evenk) language studies.

There were several projects intended for elderly people.

In the village of Solovyovsk, special events for elderly people were organized at a local community center, and in the village of Yuktali a comprehensive social support program for elderly people was launched.

There were sports activities organized for children and elderly people, book clubs, music nights, computer classes, chess tournaments, etc.

The time frame for projects was 1 to 5 months. The projects funded through the contest had to be implemented between June 1 and October 31, 2018.

In Buryatia and Amur Oblast, days and summers are so short that all infrastructure works (installation of playgrounds, etc.) have to be done quickly.

In some cases, opening ceremonies had to be moved indoors because of poor weather conditions, which is quite common in those places.

Team and partners 

Team

Nordgold’s social programs in Russia are handled by three employees spending 30% of their work time on this area of work. Social project contests in four districts were organized by two of these employees.

Bato Erdyneyev, press secretary for Buryatzoloto, has been overseeing the minigrant contest since it began in 2015. In addition to organizing training seminars in Buryatia, he helped with similar seminars in Amur Oblast in 2018.

Ivan Tomskikh is in charge of our social programs in Amur Oblast and Yakutia. Both Bato and Ivan have covered hundreds of miles to make sure the contest takes place as planned.

Partners

Both in Buryatia and Amur Oblast, we used local NGOs with extensive experience as project operators:

• Firn Club in Buryatia (established in 1988)
• Civil Initiative in Amur Oblast

These two NGOs oversaw the implementation of projects, offered recommendations, helped organize training seminars, verified project and financial reports before transferring them to Nordgold.

Local authorities at the district and local levels strongly support our program.

At the province level, we work with our operators (Firn Club and Civil Initiative) and the Irkutsk Snow Leopard Foundation, with which we have a joint program to save the population of snow leopards in Oka District.

After five years of running the social project contest, we have close ties with most (if not all) NGOs and activist groups in Oka and Muya Districts.

We expect the situation in Amur Oblast to develop the same way over time.

Resources

Financial resources

The grant fund for each of the four districts was 500,000 rubles.

Thus, the Nordgold budget for the social project contest in four districts is currently 2.4 million rubles (2 million rubles in the grant fund and 200,000 rubles in compensation for each of the two NGOs acting as contest operators).

Both the grant fund and operator’s compensation have remained unchanged since 2017.

Human resources

In all of our projects, resources are mainly provided by local communities free of charge.

Our project helped children from Urusha, Skovorodino District, to attend a volunteer summer school. The camp strengthened the local volunteer movement and helped the children develop leadership and creative skills, make new friends and make good use of their summer vacation.

Technological and material resources

A large proportion of project funding was used to create infrastructure and purchase equipment (playgrounds, equipment for dance classes, sewing machines, etc.).

Achieved results

Immediate results

Things that work well:

• On the whole, the projects are implemented in full and on schedule.

Things we pay attention to:

• As before, a larger part of allocated funds was spent on infrastructure and equipment. On the one hand, infrastructure and equipment are not perfect items for investment. Yet in our situation it is justifiable, because the districts objectively have no other way to purchase such equipment.
• Many of the projects were initiated and implemented by public sector employees: kindergarten teachers, museum workers, etc. In our situation, this is more of an advantage: projects continue after 2018, and the initiators have certified qualifications (which is necessary, for example, when working with vulnerable children).

Things that don’t work so well:

• We still weren’t able to identify income generation projects.
• Most of the participants in winning projects are children and elderly people. Working-age people are too busy looking for opportunities to make a living.
• Environmental programs still produce mixed results. On the one hand, one-off activities to clean up the area and put up posters more or less raise environmental awareness. At the same time, long-term effect (people littering less in recreational areas) isn’t noticeable. Of course, it takes years of work to change people’s behavior.
• We haven’t performed comprehensive evaluation of the program’s outcomes.

Is our program the best grant-based sustainability program?

Our program is like a low-cost carrier. We are not the most glamorous, or impressive, or even convenient program. We don’t have many bells and whistles which others consider as a must-have (e.g., external evaluation).

Yet just like a low-cost airline does what is expected of it, delivering people across long distances at a low cost, our social project contest also achieves its objectives.

The program covers a vast territory twice the size of the Netherlands and Belgium added together, and yet it is managed by two part-time workers.

We know that our small grants have catalyst effect in local communities. (But if we were to get an official confirmation from external experts, we would have to spend half of our annual budget on such confirmation.)

We know what we do and why we do it, and we won’t be misled by theoretical speculations about our goals being too low or our projects being too ordinary.

For territories with limited resources (i.e., for most Russian territories) and for companies which can’t spend tens of millions of rubles on social programs (i.e., for most Russian companies), this may really be a good role model.

Internal project assessment

The social projects we supported we pretty straightforward – simple and short-term. To evaluate their output, we analysed their budget and project descriptions. Overall results were discussed in internal meetings.

External project assessment

We discussed inviting a group of experts yet eventually this initiative proved too costly for us.

Challenges and solutions

Not many projects were able to move up to the next level. Even after a few years, not all of the initiatives we have been supporting evolved into long-term, systemic charity work. Many of them remained one-off events.

Shortage of activists. Local communities usually have a limited number of activists. Every time a person like that leaves, it has a negative effect on the community’s ability to implement quality social programs and offer quality social services to local residents.

Lack of media coverage and recognition. Most of the projects that received funding are not particularly spectacular. This is one of the reasons they don’t get a lot of media coverage, and  the activist working on them don’t get the recognition they deserve.

Part of the problem is widespread pessimism and “rolling stone mentality” (“I’m going to be leaving this place soon anyway”) – even though most people stay there their whole life and never leave.

In fragile communities, the situation often changes and you are left with some pieces of the puzzle missing. Some assets may be lost; some key people may no longer be available (because they moved to another region or got a job where they are gone from home for months); some local businesses offering financial support may face economic difficulties.

In practical terms, this means that we have to focus on must-haves and drop all nice-to-haves. For example, we discussed bringing some external experts to see the social project contest. They could audit the program and organize training seminars for local activists. Yet because of logistics issues (airplane + railroad + car), the cost of such a visit (approximately 500,000 rubles) was unacceptable for us. The idea was rejected.

Plans of further development   

First, the Company considers the program a success and plans to continue with it.

Second, we plan to expand the social project contest to include the settlements around our Taborny-Gross mines in Yakutia.

A year ago, we discussed plans to consider two more promising areas:

• Attracting tourists to Muya and Oka Districts – yet, in line with the “fail fast” approach, we decided against it because it was clear that it would be impossible to achieve significant results.
• Using the social project contest to help preserve the population of snow leopard in Oka District – we started working on this.

What has been done:

In 2018, we kept working with the Snow Leopard Foundation, which studies the animal in the Eastern Sayan.

Currently, there are only 4,000 snow leopards left in the world. Approximately 200 of them are in Russia, mostly on the plateaus of Oka District.

Initially, we considered the idea of stopping the killing of snow leopards by poachers. Yet it turned out that local people don’t hunt snow leopards because this animal is sacred to them. They believe that snow leopards guard the gates to afterlife. Poachers from other regions have very limited or no access to the area because of borderzone restrictions. Yet snow leopards often die in snares that local people set for musk deer.

One efficient way to address this issue would be to tell children of all ages about snow leopards: sooner or later, these children will grow up and become adults.

In June 2019, we held a contest among children in Oka District for the best drawing  of a snow leopard (at this point, this is not part of our social project contest). We plan to continue the project.