Community

We work with our host municipalities to address pressing needs and harness opportunities to create self-sustaining and empowered communities for generations to come.

Corporate social responsibility

Our corporate social responsibility projects within our host communities focus on education, portable skills training for youth, health, water and sanitation, waste management, poverty eradication, and enterprise and supplier development. We spent R14 million on CSR projects in 2020.

Social and Labour Plans

Our community investment programmes are detailed in our operations’ five-year social and labour plans (SLPs), which are aligned with the requirements of Mining Charter III, municipal Integrated Development Plans (IDPs), priority community needs, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, and associated regulations.

Our SLPs have been developed in consultation with our host municipalities, communities and unions, and managed by each operation to ensure greater accountability for local economic development.

Stakeholder engagement

Each operation has formal engagement structures in place with key stakeholders to discuss the needs and challenges of our communities. We participate in our host municipalities’ local economic development and IDP forums to understand municipal challenges and priority areas. We host annual events such as career exhibitions to expose local learners to mining-related careers, as well as stakeholder and supplier days for local SMMEs to interact with our operations’ leadership, end users and OEMs.

Through our community scholarships, we invest in further education initiatives to support learners from our host communities. The scheme enables qualifying students to pursue a tertiary qualification in a field of their choice. We currently support 24 youth in the scholarship programme and 17 professionals-in-training. We have offered 10 bursaries to qualifying learners interested in the mining, mechanical and electrical engineering, rock engineering, survey and geological fields

Enterprise Supplier Development programmes

Our ESD programme enables us to support local SMMEs in acquiring essential business skills needed to expand their operating capacity. In our five-year ESD plan, which will be implemented between 2020 and 2025, we have committed, in our SLP, to spending R104 million on developing our local SMMEs. We invested R8 million in 2020 as financial assistance for local SMMEs in the form of loans and grants. In 2020, our ESD programme onboarded 105 local SMMEs, including 63 enterprise development and 42 supplier development beneficiaries. The intake process focused on services entities owned and managed by black women and black youth.

In addition, 56 local, black-owned SMMEs are benefitting from our 2020 entrepreneurship programme. Another R7.5 million will be invested in 2021. In line with the vision of the Mining Charter, we will focus on developing local, black women-owned and managed, as well as black youth-owned and managed, SMMEs.

Our focus areas include establishing a pipeline of supply chain-ready local SMMEs through regular engagements such as supplier days and business forum meetings.

Current and future suppliers are aligned with our intention to transform our supply chain. We continue to encourage local SMMEs to engage via our ESD portal to access current procurement opportunities, including local content criteria in our tender adjudication process to support preferential procurement.

Human rights

We do not engage in activities that deliberately impact the rights of our host communities. Where we face legacy issues that violate human rights, we engage with affected people, investigate incidents through our internal incident management procedures and implement corrective measures. We have grievance, complaint and emergency preparedness response procedures in place at our operations. We have adopted performance standards and policies in respect of human rights, that provide the guidance and best practice required to manage our human rights impacts.