Aligning corporate social investment (CSI) with core business makes financial sense and fosters long-term sustainability. Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) CSI Manager Tebogo Molefe talks about how the state-owned enterprise’s strategic philanthropic efforts reflect and enhance its employment acceleration mandate, while creating positive social change.
The IDC’s CSI strategy has evolved over more than 20 years into a dedicated programme that is rooted in the national development finance institution’s core values. Informed by the National Development Plan (NDP) as well as international Sustainable Development Goals, at its heart is the institution’s mandate to boost employment creation and entrepreneurship.
Three fundamental pillars form the structure of the organisation’s CSI efforts. These pillars share the fundamental objective of job creation.
A fourth pillar in the overall strategy allows the IDC to respond to unanticipated humanitarian crises as they arise.
Employment begins with education
National government development plans and education priorities inform the IDC’s early childhood development (ECD) and technical vocational education and training (TVET) programmes.
The institution’s ECD programmes may not seem an obvious route to generating employment, but they take a long-term strategic approach. Improving ECD in informal settings creates the foundation for learners’ successful participation in formal education, which increases the likelihood of individuals positively contributing to the future workforce. Boosting ECD also presents the opportunity to upskill the existing informal workforce operating in this space.
ECD in the townships and rural areas has historically lacked formal structure. Facilities tend to be women-owned operations that take care of children while parents are working or seeking employment. The infrastructure is poor and there is little in the way of a formal teaching curriculum.
The IDC partners with non-proft organisations (NPOs) such as Breadline Africa and Impande whose mission is to identify and assist informal ECD facilities that do not meet the standards set out by government. The programmes improve infrastructure, provide training to childminders and inject formal education curricula into ECD centres to better prepare children for basic education.
The company’s TVET college interventions contribute more directly to artisan skills development, supporting the NDP priority of closing the gap between vocational and artisan training.
The government has acknowledged that TVET colleges, which emerged from the amalgamation of the country’s historical adult basic education and vocational colleges, are often failing to produce industry-ready graduates. Learners lack the necessary working knowledge of the latest technologies and are often unable to gain the experiential learning they need to graduate from the programmes. This is owing to a shortage of learnerships, experiential workplace opportunities and accredited trade centres.
Guided by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the IDC has been working directly with colleges since 2014 to respond to these issues. The institution contributes to the curriculum and provides up-to-date equipment to ensure that learners are exposed to the latest industry standard. It also contributes to establishing in-house trade centres at identified colleges, building and resourcing these centres to ensure the job-readiness of TVET college graduates in a range of sectors, from agriculture, business and engineering-related to digital skills development.
Inspiring entrepreneurship
The institution’s entrepreneurship CSI initiatives speak directly to its enterprise-creation mandate, focusing on self-employment and employment creation at the community level. Partnerships with cooperatives and NPOs allow the IDC to support projects and skills training at a micro level, building a variety of successful, self-sustaining initiatives.
One such programme, WeThinkCode, trains young South Africans in programming and software development, placing graduates in several partner corporates across the country. Since its inception in 2015, the programme has established itself as an effective platform for training youth in digital skills and placed hundreds of graduates from under-served communities in high-paying jobs.
In the Eastern Cape, a humble sewing group has transformed into a sustainable registered cooperative that now produces school uniforms for more than five schools. The IDC contributed towards providing advanced skills training and machines to capacitate the group, delivering an enterprise that creates work and continues to inspire the community to achieve even greater successes.
The Kusile Mzansi Community Development (KMCD) initiative also started a food garden that has evolved into an industrial-scale automated farming project that contracts with local retailers to produce A-grade tomatoes fit for export markets. The IDC’s support of this project aligns with its mandate to support community projects that favour women and youth entrepreneurial development.
It partnered with the Old Mutual Foundation and Dohne Agricultural Development Institute to provide the KMCD with technical skills as well as additional tunnels and irrigation systems to increase production. The project has created jobs for ten young community members, most of them women.
Growing consumer knowledge
The objective of supporting and building capacity for entrepreneurs as well as building small enterprises shapes the IDC’s approach to consumer education. The institution is required to offer consumer education as part of the codes of the BBBEE scorecard, which forms part of the Financial Sector Code of Good Practice. Rather than replicating existing financial literacy efforts, the IDC’s consumer education efforts are targeted at business and entrepreneurship development.
Most recently, it has partnered with the Graça Machel Trust to deliver the Women Creating Wealth investor readiness programme. The 18-month programme provides comprehensive support to women, giving them the knowledge, skills and expertise required to run high-performing businesses.
The IDC’s research has found that women-owned micro-level businesses can struggle to expand. Women may lack the necessary knowledge, confidence and mentoring to grow their businesses into more sustainable enterprises. They are also more risk averse, lacking the safety nets to take chances that might lead to failure.
The partnership began onboarding its first cohort in the second half of 2023. Successful participants will have the opportunity to become future IDC clients in their efforts to grow their businesses.
Responding to humanitarian crises
The Covid-19 pandemic activated a slew of changes to CSI strategies and practices. Within the IDC, certain projects had to be placed on temporary hiatus while the humanitarian crisis escalated. The IDC realised the importance of flexibility within its CSI strategy and established a fourth pillar that did not have to conform to core business but could still provide emergency relief in times of crisis.
During the pandemic this took the form of partnering with on-the-ground NPOs to provide food relief for communities in distress. Community members, many of them informal traders, were especially hard hit with no means to provide for themselves or their families.
In 2021, civil unrest in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), followed by the KZN floods, further demonstrated the need for CSI funding that might be allocated to unforeseen events. The institution’s relief fund allocated R40 million for humanitarian relief to assist families impacted by crises. The IDC also partnered with various NPOs to assist with rebuilding selected schools as well as the building of ECD centres and several houses that were damaged by the floods.
Focus on future giving
The IDC’s CSI efforts have evolved dramatically in the past 20 years. What started out as a series of welfare donations to charitable organisations, valued at no more than R2 million, and coordinated by one person in the company’s communications department, is now a R52 million programme coordinated by a six-person CSI team. The team will soon include a dedicated monitoring and evaluation (M&E) function to improve the department’s M&E processes.
Industrial Development Corporation
The Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) is committed to the systemic change that corporate social responsibility could contribute to building our society, but calls for more collaborative, coordinated efforts that operate within a broader strategic framework. Molefe points to the collaborative efforts that emerged during the pandemic, such as the Solidarity Fund, to illustrate what is possible when shared vision and will align. Such an approach requires setting aside competition in favour of meaningful collaboration. Coordinated programmes would avoid duplicating efforts while providing wider, more targeted philanthropic support. Working collectively would also allow partners to leverage their respective skills, expertise and finances for more effective CSI contribution.
Tebogo Molefe
Manager: Corporate Social Investment
csi@idc.co.za
Source: The original version of this article was published in the Trialogue Business in Society Handbook 2023 (26th edition)