“We’ve got an excellent relationship with the local communities”, says Paul Donaldson of South Boulder Mines.

South Boulder has just completed a pre-feasibility study at the Colluli potash deposit in south eastern Eritrea, the shallowest known potash deposit in the world.

That fact alone speaks to the economic potential of the project. But there’s more. “The original plan was to mine the sylvinite only”, says Paul, “but that gives you a very high strip ratio”.

That high stripping ratio meant the mine would have produced more waste rock than was really economic, so the company turned to the neighbouring kainitite orebody and discovered that to be economic too.

Hey presto, the pre-feasibility plan suddenly became workable, and a realistic model involving the production of 425,000 tonnes of potash per year initially, rising eventually to over a million.

Given that there’s a billion tonnes of ore in the ground, producing at that rate looks a realistic proposition.

But not without the support of the locals.

South Boulder is lucky because there isn’t actually a community on the tenement itself, so there is no need for the uprooting and wholesale transfer of villages or the diversion of existing watercourses.

Having said that though, there are plenty of people in the wider neighbourhood, and especially between Colluli and the coast, from where South Boulder plans to export its produce to the wider world.

“There are two communities within 20 kilometres of us”, says Paul. “We do regular stakeholder engagement with them, and we’ve spoken with some of the communities that are close to the coast.”

One of the key messages is that South Boulder has no plans to interfere with the local water supply. “We’ve deliberately gone to the coast for water and not to the local communities”, says Paul.

Thus, although it’s not stripped out as an individual line in the pre-feasibility numbers, a planned US$49 million expenditure on water supply, road and port does show a company prepared to spend significant money on ensuring that it has the right footprint in the wider region.

And that approach seems to be paying off. “The people are friendly and they basically want the project to succeed”, says Paul.

It helps of course, that the Eritrean government is the company’s joint venture partner at Colluli. “Where we need advice they help”, says Paul. “In Eritrea we’ve been able to achieve everything we’ve needed to.”

But it’s not just that the government is helping the company along. There’s more to it than that – in a word, jobs.

“Our priority in the future is to create preferential jobs”, says Paul. “As the project grows we’ll look at job creation and upskilling.”

Eritrea’s economy has been growing pretty fast in recent years, but following years of war with eastern neighbour Ethiopia, was coming from a pretty low base.

The government knows that for the momentum to continue, projects like Colluli need to succeed. And, with the help of South Boulder’s outreach programmes, the locals know it too.