APPROACH

Who Are Our Stakeholders?

IAMGOLD has thousands of stakeholders. At our projects and operations, our priority stakeholders include, but are not limited to, our employees, our host communities, civil society organizations and both local and national governments. At the corporate level, we share many of the same types of stakeholders, but we also interact regularly with shareholders and our own Board of Directors.

How Do We Identify Our Stakeholders?

We encourage our sites to take an inclusive approach to stakeholder identification, and to cast as wide a net as possible to avoid missing anyone. The identification process is an ongoing exercise in which stakeholders are directly involved. We also encourage our sites to pay extra attention to vulnerable groups that may be excluded from traditional forms of engagement. Each year we engage with thousands of local, regional and national level stakeholders in the countries where we operate, the majority of which are in our host communities. In 2011, we held over 360 unique stakeholder meetings, including town halls, consultation committees, focus groups, women’s groups, and individual discussions.

Approach

Our engagement approach is unique to every site. The frequency and intensity of our meetings depend on the local, regional and national stakeholder context. While each site has the flexibility to design their own engagement program, guidance is provided at various levels, which includes:

The Sustainability Policy
The Sustainability Framework
The Community Relations Handbook
The Community Relations Audit Tool

Overall, our engagement is guided by principles of honesty, transparency and the construction of meaningful relationships. Engagement is done on both an ad hoc and systematic basis. We respond to incoming questions from communities, civil society, investment firms and others, but we also have management systems that set out ongoing engagement schedules, track meetings and measure the general satisfaction of our engagement. We meet with stakeholders in formal settings, like the Annual General Meeting, community open houses or in scheduled meetings with community consultation committees. We also take advantage of less formal opportunities such as individual consultations and community ‘walk abouts’, which also give stakeholders the opportunity to voice any concerns or interest they may have in the Company.

Stakeholder Meetings
In 2011, IAMGOLD met with thousands of stakeholders at the local, regional and national levels. Our engagement approach changes to meet the requirements of the setting. At some sites, and for some projects, we meet with community members at the individual and household levels. In other cases, we host town hall meetings or meet with consultation committees, which are set up specifically to communicate with the mine site. Here are some highlights from our countries of operation.

Essakane, Burkina Faso: Meeting the Challenges of Dialogue with Thousands of Local Stakeholders
Prior to, and during the construction of the Essakane mine, a comprehensive community consultation effort enabled us to reach out to a very wide scope of community members in the dozens of towns and villages surrounding the mine site. Much of our planning at Essakane is still influenced by the results of this process. Now in operation, the mine site has looked for more efficient, but equally effective ways to communicate with the broader community. Due to the number of citizens living within close proximity to the mine, we are limited by the number of household and small group consultations that we can conduct each year.

The most effective way to reach the large numbers of the population has been through the community consultation committees. These committees are made up of a variety of community members, including, but not limited to, traditional leaders, religious leaders, elected leaders and representatives from various community committees, such as community development committees.

The consultation committees are one of our most important venues for communication with communities, but they are not our only vehicle for dialogue. Depending on the community and issues that arise from our meetings, we often establish issue-specific groups within a community to either tackle an ongoing problem or execute community development projects. In some of the larger communities, we have also set up information offices where residents can submit questions, concerns, grievances or job applications, and receive information about the mine and specific projects that may impact or benefit their community.

Rosebel, Suriname: Building Trust Through Co-Monitoring Programs
Similar to our Essakane Mine, the Community Relations Department at Rosebel Gold Mines has established community consultation committees to efficiently reach a large population of people in a way that is both meaningful and productive. The consultation committees at Rosebel have been in place for many years and are reviewed on a regular basis to examine their contribution to both the Company and the community. The mine also maintains office hours in the various communities, conducts regular “walkabouts”, and engages when necessary on specific issues and development initiatives.

Over the years, the most common concern of local communities has been the environmental impact and how the mine has been managing environmental protection. Communities were most concerned about their water and how mine activities could potentially affect their local water supplies. The Company has always maintained a robust environmental management system and has communicated both its values and the results of its performance to the community. While there have never been any significant environmental issues impacting the community, the community has never had the opportunity to actually see the site’s environmental management first-hand.

To make the policies and management systems more transparent, it was decided to involve the local communities in the Company’s environmental inspections. Beginning in 2011, the Company began working with existing community consultation committees in 7 different surrounding communities, starting with tours of the facility to familiarize community members with the site’s processes.

After some essential capacity building processes to help community members better understand the science of environmental management, quarterly inspections began for the tailings impoundment, waste areas and other essential environmental check points. The process will continue to require a significant amount of capacity-building in order to maximize the effectiveness of the community inspections team. For community members, there is much to learn about the environmental science, and for the Company, there is much to learn about how to communicate to communities on such technical issues.

In its short existence the initiative has been a success. The process continues not only to build trust, but is also developing considerable environmental knowledge among local community members.

Niobec, Canada: Engaging the Community on Mine Expansion
On May 4, 2011, IAMGOLD publicly announced its intention to complete a $976 million expansion project at the Niobec Mine, in the Chicoutimi area of Quebec. The news announcement was well received by the media and many local residents, but there were also concerns, particularly about new mining methods and the potential for an open pit mine. Along with environmental questions, there were concerns about the potential for relocation and expropriation. In anticipation of the response, a 4-person, project-specific community relations team was formed.

A strategy was created to engage the different local stakeholders; in particular, the group that lived nearest the mine. Efforts were undertaken to engage this group and to provide them with a channel to express their apprehensions and ask questions. Between June and September, the team members met with over 160 neighbours.

To expand the outreach, an event was held in the middle of town and the entire community was invited. At the event, information brochures were circulated and geologists and sustainability professionals were present to answer questions. Government officials were in attendance as well as the local MP. In all, 600 citizens of Saint-Honoré attended, representing 10% of the city.

To continue the ongoing dialogue, a community relations office was built outside of the mine and citizens were encouraged to drop by whenever they had questions. More consultation and information activities are being planned in order to demonstrate the transparency of our project and provide local community members the chance to be part of the new direction of the mine.