Centerra provides communities of interest, project-impacted stakeholders and Indigenous groups with an accessible community-based mechanism through which they can provide feedback and raise grievances.

Our mechanism is intended to apply to all local stakeholders and groups at any stage of our operations or related activities, including exploration, operation, care and maintenance, and closure. The mechanism is intended to provide a framework for teams to define effective remedies for both collective and individual community grievances.

To ensure the effectiveness of our grievance mechanism, we define clear levels of responsibility throughout the Company and detail an accountability framework for all Centerra personnel.

Centerra’s community relations teams monitor, track, and evaluate engagement activities by documenting and reviewing all feedback and grievances received through a variety of channels, including community meetings, community offices, company and community events, conference presentations, and phone or email.

We recognize that grievances may indicate more systemic or deep-rooted issues. Consequently, senior management is responsible for reviewing the grievance register on a monthly basis to ensure that necessary redress is provided in a timely and respectful manner.

We consistently evaluate the effectiveness of the grievance mechanism to ensure that it reaches our local communities, and that it is seen as transparent and trustworthy.

Our grievance mechanism is built on nine key pillars that have been adapted from the effectiveness criteria included in John Ruggie’s “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect, and Remedy’ Framework”:

A key part of our stakeholder engagement process is ensuring that project-affected communities are fully consulted on activities that will impact their physical settlements or economic livelihoods and building capacity so that communities can properly participate in the resettlement process and provide meaningful input.

At our Öksüt Mine, the permitted area resulted in a restriction of access to existing informal land users, predominantly seasonal livestock herders who used the area as communal pastureland. Through a rigorous stakeholder identification process and ongoing and transparent community engagement, we enabled communities to provide meaningful input and participate in the development of the Livelihood Restoration Plan (LRP) to address the economic displacement caused by our activities.

Key aspects of the LRP included providing income-generating activities for users of the pastureland. For example, 10 pastoralist households were provided with about 30 hives each, along with beekeeping equipment. Over a period of six months, 2,450 kg of honey was produced from 311 beehives. In addition, the LRP provided agricultural equipment support for users of the pastureland, funding for animal watering pond improvement and new pond construction, and support for access road renovations at the pasturelands.