RE: Kavango Story20 Jun 2021 13:21
Part 2:
"“It’s important to use local expertise so we recruit from Botswana, including the University. The people are quite young and inexperienced but so long as they have the right attitude, we can train them up,” says Foster. “They become valuable members of our team and buy into our geological model of what we’re trying to do. They know the country, they know the people in the country, local communities and how things are done.”
Foster is clear that a company like Kavango Resources, particularly as a small company, needs a combination of technical and financial skills, as well as projects themselves that have potential. But there is more to it than that.
As Foster tells us, there’s one element that sets Kavango Resources apart.
“The final differentiator is that we all have skin in the game,” he says. “We all have very sizeable shareholdings in the company so our overheads are small, we all take minimal salaries, so our overhead is one of the lowest on the exchange with most of the money going back into the ground.”
A Question of Geophysics
Having the right people and enough capital are two key pillars for projects like this, but ultimately any mining operation comes down to finding minerals in the ground. In Botswana, that presents miners with a practical obstacle.
“Botswana is covered in sand, so there are huge challenges in terms of geology,” Foster says. “Luckily, geophysics has advanced hugely over the last ten years and we can do surveys by aeroplane, mapping down to 400 metres below the surface, as deep as you want to go. A long time ago you wouldn’t have been able to model that data, but we have been able to develop detailed 3D models.”
Even then, there are still risks, and managing risk is another challenge. This is why Kavango Resources is working across two project sites in Botswana. Now they’re reaching the point where they will find out if those risks pay off.
“The next four months we need to define exactly what we’re going to do with the drilling, because drilling is expensive and if you’re going down 300 metres that is going to cost money,” Foster says. “We’re doing a lot more geophysical work so that when we do drill, we’re not just going into sand. Then, probably around the beginning of the third quarter of this year, we’ll start a drilling campaign. At our second site, we did some flying last month and we’re awaiting the results. We have two projects and the bigger of the two we want to get to the point of drilling by the end of this year.”
It’s clear talking with Foster that this is a real moment-of-truth for the company.
“With projects like this I think there is usually a five-year window to prove what you’re trying to do,” he says.
But experience says Foster gives us reason to be optimistic.
“This is the sixth small company I’ve personally been involved with in the last 25 years and they’ve all gone from not very much to quite substantial sales,” he says. “You mustn’t lose sight of that
Sign In
Follow the stocks
