A licence from a government is not permission from the people who live there.

Consent is a relationship, not a signature

A mining licence granted by a government is permission from a state. It is not permission from the people who farm the land, draw water from the stream and live with the dust. Those are different things, and a company that confuses them will discover the difference eventually, usually at the worst possible moment.

Quintel’s working definition of consent is behavioural rather than documentary: an operation has consent when the people affected by it would, if asked privately and without a company representative present, say that its presence has been net positive for them personally. That is a harder standard than a signed agreement and it can be lost in a season.

The group commissions an independent perception survey at every operation every two years, conducted by a local research organisation with no reporting line to site management, sampling both directly affected villages and the wider district. The results go to the board committee and the headline findings are published, including at the two operations where they are uncomfortable.

Land and resettlement

Mining takes land, and the land it takes is usually somebody’s livelihood. Quintel applies the IFC Performance Standard 5 framework to every instance of land access, whether or not a lender requires it, and whether the displacement is physical or purely economic.

The sequence is: avoid, then minimise, then compensate, then restore. Avoidance is genuinely attempted and genuinely constrains design — at Bagoé the pit shells and plant site were relocated twice during study work specifically to avoid physical resettlement, at a cost in stripping ratio the group accepted.

Where displacement cannot be avoided, compensation is at full replacement value plus a disturbance allowance, replacement land must be of equal or better productive capacity, replacement housing carries secure documented title, and transitional income support runs for at least 24 months. Baseline surveys are conducted before any land is taken, and livelihood restoration is measured against that baseline by an independent auditor reporting to the board committee rather than to site management.

The Fatala northern pit resettlement, completed in 2025, moved 214 households. The independent completion audit found 96% at or above their pre-move livelihood baseline. Nine households were below it. All nine are in a remediation process with named accountable managers and quarterly published progress, and the audit will be repeated on those households in 2027. A 96% result is not a pass mark.

Contribution by operation

Community investment excludes statutory community fund contributions required by law, which are reported within taxes and royalties. Local procurement means spend with suppliers registered in the host country.

Local content that is actually local

Local procurement figures are among the easiest numbers in mining to inflate. A fuel distributor registered in the capital that imports everything and employs nine people counts as local spend under most definitions, and buying from it changes very little in the district around the mine.

Quintel reports local procurement in three tiers so that the distinction is visible: spend with nationally registered suppliers (US$881 million, 68% of total), spend with suppliers headquartered in the province or region of the operation (US$247 million, 19%), and spend with suppliers owned by people living in the directly affected communities (US$58 million, 4.5%).

The third number is the one the group manages hardest, because it is the one that changes a district. Growing it requires supplier development rather than procurement policy: unbundling contracts that are too large for a local business to bid, paying in 14 days rather than 60 so that working capital is not the barrier, and running a business development programme that has supported 214 enterprises since 2018, of which 163 are still trading.

Grievance mechanisms

Every operation runs a grievance mechanism accessible in person, by phone and in writing, in the languages actually spoken locally, with a stated resolution target of 30 days. Grievances are logged whether or not the company believes they have merit, because the number of complaints an operation receives is a measure of access to the mechanism, not a measure of how badly the operation is behaving.

In FY2025 the group logged 412 grievances across six operations. Of those, 371 were closed within the 30-day target, 33 were closed late and 8 remained open at year end. The largest categories were dust (114), compensation valuation disputes (88), employment and recruitment fairness (76) and vehicle-related road safety (61).

A grievance mechanism only works if raising a grievance is safe. The mechanism is separated from the compensation negotiation team — a change made on the recommendation of the Fatala completion audit — and community members may escalate directly to the group Speak Up channel, bypassing the operation entirely.

Security and human rights

Mine security is where community relations most often turn violent, and the record of this industry is bad. Quintel applies the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights at every operation, and the requirements are specific rather than aspirational.

All security personnel, whether private contractors or public forces deployed to a site, are trained annually in use of force and human rights, and no person may work on a Quintel site without that training on record. Every use-of-force incident is logged, investigated and reported to the board committee. Contracts with private security providers include the right to remove an individual from site without cause and a prohibition on firearms except where a documented risk assessment requires them; at four of six operations, site security is unarmed.

Where public security forces are deployed under a host country legal requirement, the group documents the arrangement, communicates the applicable standards in writing, and reports incidents to the relevant authority as well as internally. In FY2025 there were three use-of-force incidents across the group, all at Lubumba, none resulting in serious injury, all investigated with findings reported to the committee.

Artisanal and small-scale mining

Informal mining occurs on or near ground the group holds in three countries. It is a livelihood for large numbers of people, it is frequently dangerous, and the standard industry response — eviction by security forces — is both a human rights risk and, on the evidence, ineffective.

Quintel’s policy has three parts. First, no purchase of artisanally mined material of any kind, at any price, anywhere in the group; this is a standing board-level prohibition with no exceptions process. Second, no forced eviction; where informal mining occurs on a Quintel licence the group engages through the relevant district authority and supports formalisation where a legal pathway exists. Third, investment in alternative livelihoods, which at Lubumba has supported 1,870 households into agriculture, transport and trades cooperatives since 2019.

This approach is slower and less complete than a fence and a security contract. It also has not produced a single violent confrontation in six years, which the alternative reliably does.

Tazoult, acquired in February 2026, adds a fourth country to that list. Roughly 190 people work informally on old workings and waste dumps inside the licence area. We are mapping who they are and what they earn, with the commune councils and a regional non-governmental organisation, before proposing anything. We do not yet have an answer there.