Community

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.

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.

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 52 youth in the scholarship programme and 93 professionals-in-training. We have offered 127 bursaries to qualifying learners interested in the mining, mechanical and electrical engineering, rock engineering, survey and geological fields as at 31 March 2024.  

Enterprise Supplier Development programmes

In keeping with one of our values, ‘Transformation for the benefit of our stakeholders’, we aim to leave a legacy of sustainable development in the communities in which we operate. Our aspirations are to create a pipeline of local, supply chain-ready SMEs and the development of ready to scale, funding ready local SMEs.  In our pursuit of this, we anchor our development initiatives on three pillars;

1. Support – Develop smaller enterprises. Find, connect and develop new, small suppliers.
2. Include – Embrace smaller enterprises. Include SMEs into supply chain and grow.
3. Transform – Drive empowerment within the supplier base. Scale and transform.

As at 31 March 2024, our supply chain achieved the following outcomes; we spent R5,5bn on Black owned entities, R843m on Women owned entities, R2,2bn with SMEs and R750m on entities based in our host communities. In the same period, our development initiatives achieved the following outcomes; we spent R21m on the incubation of 132 local businesses and R9,5m on the funding of 78 local SMEs.       

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.