At the beginning, following a request from the Government of Madagascar, there was a very strong request to create a maximum of jobs, providing, as much as possible, knowledge transfer and capacity-building at the same time. As SNC-Lavalin, as a service provider but also taking a small equity participation in the project, we designed a program 15 years ago for other projects being developed in southern Africa. The program was called LRDI. That stands for local resource development initiative.
The program had three pillars. The first pillar was a labour training program to raise the employability of the local population, which trained 6,100 local employees and contributed significantly to the percentage of local workers on the overall manpower of the project. I indicated to you that at the peak of construction, there were 10,000 workers on the project at the same time. Eighty-five percent of them were locals, a number we've never reached before.
The second pillar of the program was a local procurement and SME development program, where we designed the project to maximize packages to be tendered locally. We trained local companies on how to submit winning proposals and whenever possible we also provided capacity-building, mentorship, management and technical training programs, and thousands of hours of support to the local companies that had contracts with us, because we saw it was important for a 27-year-long project to build around the project with the local economy and build the local suppliers.
The third pillar was a very important program working with development organizations in the region, especially in agriculture, because farmers would want to sell their products to the project. We needed to prepare meals for thousands of workers every day so this program was intended to maximize the benefit, and it is today one of SNC-Lavalin's best practices.