Source: Maurice Jackson for Streetwise Reports 05/24/2018
Proven and Probable’s Maurice Jackson interviews DNI Metals Executive Chairman Dan Weir, who discusses his company’s plans for its projects in Madagascar.
Maurice Jackson: Our feature issuer is establishing itself to become one of the world’s leading in graphite producers, DNI Metals. Joining us for our conversation is Dan Weir, the executive chairman of DNI Metals.
Dan, DNI shareholders have been awaiting some company updates, let’s get everybody up to speed because I know that you’ve been working laboriously since our last discussion and want to share the fruits of your labor.
All too often when I talk to speculators, they focus on the tangibles. I’d like to remind our readers that the intangibles are equally important, which leads to today’s press release entitled “DNI sponsors clean water day in Madagascar.”
What can you share with us?
Dan Weir: It’s very important. We take fresh water for granted; we can walk over to our taps, we can brush our teeth, we can drink the water. In most places in the world that’s not what happens. There are approximately 21 or 22 million people that live in Madagascar and, according to U.S. AID, over 11 million people in Madagascar don’t have fresh water.
We started a drilling program in April of last year, and part of that program the government wants you to work with the local community; it’s called CSR or community relationship that they want us to help the community. In fact, they make it mandatory that you do certain things for the local community in order to operate a drill program. As part of that because we had a drill rig there, we drilled a water well for the local village. They had a small soccer field that was built on the side of the hill and kind of sloping; because we had the bulldozer there, we leveled out a whole big field and built them a nice soccer field. When I was there a couple of weeks ago, tons of kids were out playing soccer, so it was really great to see that they were actually using that.
When we were developing the project, we had to put some roads in off the main paved highway and as part of that we took and extended the road right back to the village. So now it’s about a three-kilometer road that goes round the village right out to the paved highway, which they never had before. They always used to just walk back and forth on a small path through the bush.
These people are very poor, they grow fruit trees and basically live off the fruit and the rice that they grow. When we were putting the roads in, we did knock down some of those fruit trees. We planted two or three times as many fruit trees as we knocked down, all along the side of the road; it helps stop the erosion and it also gives them fruit trees. And also we compensated the people for that too, meaning that any fruit trees that we knocked down we paid them for that as well.
We worked very hard with the local people, and I’m very excited in the future to work with the local people and potentially make their lives better with the development of a mine because we can give them jobs and we can help them with all sorts of other things to improve their lives.
Maurice Jackson: I had the pleasure of going to Madagascar twice last year to visit the DNI projects. What a wonderful group of people there in the community and I know they welcome DNI’s initiatives. Just from a personal standpoint because I know you have a very intimate relationship with the community there, how does this event impact you?
Dan Weir: It’s pretty amazing that we were able to sponsor the event, number one, and number two, in being able to give people fresh water. I remember back in February of 2017, we were on the property looking and deciding the route for the roads. One of the routes we looked at was going farther to the north and coming in from the north. We ultimately brought the road in from the south to the main zone and to the village, but we looked at bringing a road in from the north.
A group of us split apart when we were deciding on the route. I wanted to go look over here and see if the road could go that way; a couple of the other people went the other way. We got separated and I ended up back at the village. I didn’t have any water with me; I’d left my water bottle with one of the other people. I went over to a small hut and asked if they had any water.” They had a barrel, they put a cup in the water and handed it to me, and I looked in the cup and it was a reddish color; it almost looked like rust, and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, these people actually drink this water all the time.”
Now that we were able to drill a well and give them fresh, clean water right in the village, that’s a pretty good feeling, I can tell you.
Maurice Jackson: Kudos to you. Job well done there. What kind of response was DNI receiving from the community?
Dan Weir: The community is very supportive of us coming in and developing this project, increasing their standard of living. Again, they’re looking for jobs. The statistics in Madagascar is somewhere around an 80% unemployment rate. The average person lives off or earns less than 50 cents a day, so if we can provide good jobs for the locals, that is huge, and they welcome …read more
From:: The Energy Report