Hello and welcome back to the proactive studio. I'm Tyler Tully and today I'm joined by Celsius Resources Executive Director Mark Van Kirkwick to talk us through the company's recent MOA with Tezda in the Philippines, an agreement which aims to empower local communities and ensure their active participation in the MCB COPCOL projects development. Mark, thanks for joining us. Good day Tyler, just trying to get over daylight savings for now, otherwise all good. That's good to hear. Sorry, your announcement today with Tezda sounds like an excellent step towards community empowerment at the MCB project. Can you start by talking us through who Tezda is and what they do? Well, Tezda is the technical education and skills development authority in the Philippines. So, for people in Australia, you would equate that to the same organisation as we have here as TAFE. They perform a similar function. So, Tesla is mandated to provide practical and industry-relevant training that will support the economy in the future. So, the country needs to sustain itself and economic growth in the future as skilled workforce. So, Tezda does this by providing skilled training programs throughout all sorts of areas in the economy, community-based training programs for communities that traditionally haven't had access to education and training facilities in the past. Special employment programs to fill specific gaps, scholarships, industry partnerships and also promotional of social enterprises too. So, it's a really positive and forward-looking organisation and we're happy to be involved. So, can you tell us more about the agreement now and the specific skills that will be developed under the training program and I guess how these are going to directly benefit the local community? Yeah, so in our case, we've got our initial two-year training agreement. We'll ensure that the local community can really benefit from the employment opportunities that are going to come from the project. So, obviously, the project will start early works hopefully at the later in the year and right through to production, we'll need a skilled workforce. So, the initial focus will be on those skills that will really support the early works and construction phase. And as we outlined them in the announcement, the initial targeted skills are carpentry, masonry, painting, formwork, welding and plumbing to name a few. So, they are the basic skills, the basic mid-level skills that are required to really start getting a project off the ground. And as we mentioned before, it's a really important empowerment step for the local community and we're really excited to be engaging in this way and partnering in this way. So, given your recent progress at the MCB project, including the certification precondition, which we spoke about maybe several weeks ago now, what are the next key milestones that we can expect in the coming months? Yes, as we discussed recently, it's all about, after the certificate of precondition, it's all about finalizing the project financing and moving forward with the early works later on in the year. So, that's the main topic in town at the moment. There's been a bit of media speculation in the international media about our possible financing partners, but we can't really make any comments on that until we have a binding agreement and we'll inform the market accordingly then. As you can see with this announcement, there's lots of little incremental initiatives underway and they're all really, they're additive to the community benefit here and we'll keep everybody updated as we go. I mean, me, there's exciting times ahead. We'll be ticking away slowly but surely on all these fronts. It definitely sounds like very exciting times for Celsius. Mark, thanks for joining us. And cheers.
