Mr. Glen Parsons reports

AWALE RESOURCES DEMONSTRATES HIGH GRADE PLUNGE CONTINUITY AT EMPIRE MAIN, ODIENNE, COTE D'IVOIRE

Awale Resources Ltd. has released further exceptional gold results and has confirmed plunge continuity of mineralization from the final five holes of the phase 2 drill program at the Empire gold discovery.

These reported drill holes have successfully confirmed both the high-grade nature and steep westerly plunge continuity of mineralization at Empire Main. The plunging mineralization remains open and is now tested to a theoretical open-pit depth of 125 vertical metres; the open mineralization also confirms the underground potential of Empire Main.

Highlights:

• OEDD-37 -- confirms shallow mineralization and high-grade gold 25 metres (m) updip/plunge of 201-gram-metre intercept in OEDD-24:
  • 68 m at 2.4 grams per tonne (g/t) gold (Au) from surface:
    • Including 15.4 m at 3.3 g/t Au from 16.6 m and one m at 30.9 g/t Au from 31 m;
    • Including 22 m at 4.1 g/t Au from 40 m and five m at 8.1 g/t Au from 57 m and one m at 35.2 g/t Au from 58 m;
• OEDD-33 -- confirms high-grade plunging mineralization at 120 m vertical depth:
  • 39 m at 1.4 g/t Au from 133 m:
    • Including 12 m at 2.6 g/t Au from 160 m;
• OEDD-35 -- confirms plunge mineralization at 100 to 120 m vertical depth east of OEDD-33:
  • 0.8 m at 25.5 g/t Au from 32 m;
  • 12 m at 2.3 g/t Au from 117 m:
    • Including three m at four g/t Au from 117 m;
  • Three m at 2.6 g/t Au from 146 m;
• OEDD-34 -- confirms northern lode and broader mineralization downplunge of OEDD-9 (optimal drill direction) -- hole ended in mineralization at 175 m:
  • 28.3 m at 1.2 g/t Au from 30.7 m:
    • Including 9.3 m at two g/t Au from 30.7 m;
  • 22 m at 1.9 g/t Au from 97 m downhole:
    • Including six m at 3.3 g/t Au from 97 m;
  • Nine m at 1.1 g/t Au from 133 m;
  • 3.7 m at 2.3 g/t Au from 171 m -- hole ended in mineralization.

Drill intervals are reported as downhole; true widths are approximately 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the downhole interval.

Company chief executive officer Glen Parsons commented today: "Empire Main is a significant early-stage high-grade gold discovery for Awale; these final drill holes both verifies the high-grade gold and confirms downplunge continuity of mineralization at Empire Main. We have now also demonstrated shallow mineralization in hole OEDD-37, with economic gold grades intercepted from surface; further to this shallow mineralization, 22 m at four g/t Au in primary mineralization from this hole confirms the high-grade nature of the Empire gold system.

"Awale will continue to systematically explore extensions to the Empire Main discovery, as well as the Empire corridor, with a view to building a gold camp at Odienne -- initial results are now coming through from recent auger drilling at Charger and Empire Extension prospects and look encouraging -- we expect to have a complete set of results in the ensuing week. These targets, along with the new discoveries at anomaly 1 and anomaly 2, will form the core of the 5,000-metre RC/DD drill program planned for May/June, 2021.

"Our aim is to achieve an initial resource at Empire Main and continue to build gold ounces proximal to Empire Main and along strike of the 20-kilometre-long Empire mineralized corridor.

"I look forward to keeping the market updated accordingly as work programs develop."

Follow-up exploration plan at Odienne

Awale remains confident of the upside potential of the Empire corridor and has an aggressive exploration campaign designed for 2021. The near-term focus for the Odienne project is as follows:

• The company is testing potential eastern offsets from Empire Main, in addition to western extension targets. A 500-metre gap exists between current drilling at Empire Main and anomaly 1 and the western extension of the Empire structure. A program of 240 auger holes for 964 m was completed on Dec. 8 as a targeting exercise and will guide the next phase of drilling at Empire Main.
• Proximal to this, a new parallel structural target to Empire has been auger drilled approximately three kilometres (km) to the north-northeast of Empire Main. This will feed into the next program scout drilling over the greater empire structure. Results are also pending for this auger program:
  • The Charger prospect is approximately three km north of Empire. Legacy soil sampling by Randgold returned up to 1,677 parts per billion (ppb) gold (Au) within a 600-metre-long greater-than-100-part-per-billion-gold anomaly. Initial mapping has revealed diorite body central to the prospect area that is bound by a package of basalts and intermediate volcaniclastics and tuffaceous rock.
• There will be further detailed interpretation and understanding of the first pass intercepts from scout drilling at anomalies 1 and 2, as well as anticipated further results from anomaly 1 follow-up drilling.

About the Empire Main discovery

Empire Main discovery is a high-grade gold discovery characterized by multiphase deformation, alteration and veining hosted within a diorite intrusion. Mineralization is associated with early potassic (biotite) alteration plus/minus Au and pyrite, calc silicate alteration (rare garnet, clinopyroxene and pyrrhotite), and later carbonate and silica sericite alteration. The abundant free gold is likely late and associated with the final silica-carbonate-sericite phase.

High-grade mineralization is hosted in brittle/ductile quartz vein arrays that are oriented from east-west to northeast and exhibit both shallow and steep plunges. The host diorite lies within an over-20-kilometre-long and one-kilometre to two-kilometre-wide brittle/ductile shear zone, named the Empire corridor. Mineralization at the Empire Main discovery remains open along strike and downdip/plunge. Beyond the Empire Main discovery there is high potential for discovery or similar or larger deposits along this fertile structural corridor.

Empire was discovered through systematic exploration by Awale, resulting in a coincident geology, gold/arsenic geochemistry and ground geophysics (induced polarization (IP)) anomaly. This discovery demonstrates high-grade gold-bearing fluid flow within the empire corridor and the company plans to continue exploring along this fertile shear zone to make new discoveries and rapidly accrete the gold inventory through extensions of know mineralization and new discoveries.

Previously reported highlights from the Empire Main drilling are listed below:

• OEDD-1:
  • 18.15 m at 4.9 g/t Au from 40 m downhole:
    • Including 10.4 m at 7.9 g/t Au from 40 m downhole;
• OEDD-2:
  • 27 m at 3.1 g/t Au from 43.2 m downhole:
    • Including nine m at 5.3 g/t Au from 43.2 m downhole;
• OEDD-9:
  • 17 m at 2.6 g/t Au from 40 m downhole:
    • Including 2.65 m at 15.4 g/t Au from 40 m;
  • 16.74 m at 1.9 g/t Au from 74.26 m downhole:
    • Including 9.28 m at 2.7 g/t Au from 80.72 m;
  • 16 m at 1.8 g/t Au from 98 m downhole:
    • Including three m at 7.6 g/t Au from 111 m downhole;
• OERC0021:
  • 18 m at three g/t Au from 97 m downhole and two m at 15.5 g/t Au from 111 m downhole;
  • 11 m at 2.5 g/t Au from 140 m downhole and two m at 5.6 g/t Au from 140 m downhole;
• OEDD-24:
  • 15 m at 13.1 g/t Au from 69 m, including two m at 20 g/t Au from 69 m, 7.6 m at 20.1 g/t Au from 74.7 m and one m at 129.8 g/t Au from 76 m;
• OEDD-18:
  • 11 m at 4.9 g/t Au from 40 m downhole, including one m at 4.8g/t Au and one m at 40.2 g/t Au from 40 and 41 m, respectively;
• OEDD-16:
  • 17 m at 3.5 g/t Au from 86 m downhole, including one m at 11.9 g/t Au and one m at 11.7 g/t Au from 87 and 90 m, respectively;
• OEDD-32:
  • 10 m at 1.6 g/t Au from 67 m -- northern lode:
    • Seven m at 2.4 g/t Au from 136 m;
    • 22 m at 3.8 g/t Au from 92 m and one m at 44 g/t Au from 104 m;
• OEDD-31:
  • 16 m at two g/t Au from 45 m -- northern lode:
    • 11 m at 2.5 g/t Au from 61 m, including one m at 10.4 g/t Au from 74 m;
    • 15 m at 1.6 g/t Au from 85 m, including one m at 9.3 g/t Au from 95 m.

The above results are all downhole intercepts and are approximately 75 per cent of true width of mineralization.

Quality control and assurance

Analytical work for drill core and RC percussion samples is being carried out at the independent Intertek Laboratories Ghana Ltd., an ISO 17025 certified laboratory. Samples are stored at the company's field camps and put into sealed bags; they are stored securely until collected by Intertek for transportation to Ghana.

Drill holes reported in this release are HQ core and have been sampled as three-fourths core (approximately six kilograms per metre), with one-fourth sliver of the core sample being reserved as a library sample at the company offices. The remaining three-fourths core samples are logged in the Intertek tracking system, weighed, dried and finely crushed to better than 70 per cent, passing a two-millimetre screen of which 50 per cent is pulverized to 85 per cent, passing a 75-micron, while the remaining 50 per cent is reserved. The pulverized sample is then leached by the LeachWELL method with a further two fire assays being completed on the tail samples from the leach to monitor leach efficacy. Total gold is reported from leach and fire assays at grades of over 0.2 g/t gold the leach is recovering 95.4 per cent of all gold.

Blanks, core duplicates, crush duplicates and certified reference material (standards) are being used to monitor laboratory performance during the analysis. As a further measure, all samples in potentially mineralized zones at Empire Main have routinely have a quartz wash placed between each sample to prevent any smearing of high-grade gold -- 3 per cent of these quartz wash samples are routinely analyzed, while the remainder are stored with the analysis pulps.

Qualified person

The technical and scientific information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved for release by Andrew Chubb, the company's qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Chubb is the company's chief operating officer and holds an economic geology degree, is a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG), and is a member of the Society of Economic Geologists (SEG). Mr. Chubb has 18 years of experience in international minerals exploration and mining project evaluation.

We seek Safe Harbor.