Proudly SA to play its part in war against unemployment

The Jobs Summit called for clear and measurable solutions to the crisis

business constituents that was invited to be present at the summit.

We took with us a number of companies from whom we had elicited commitments of increased localisation in both the amount of local content in their production processes, and in their procurement of more local goods and services used during the course of doing business.

Many of the companies are already committed to localisation, most are Proudly South African members, while some offered their commitment through our strategic partners, including The Manufacturing Circle and Business Leadership South Africa.

Among those corporates are CocaCola Beverages SA, whose R400 million agricultural fund will support emerging farmers and small local suppliers of inputs.

SA Breweries has made a commitment to create 10 000 jobs by 2022, many through their Go Farming initiative, aimed at establishing thriving barley, hops, maize and malt industries in this country.

Nestlé SA’s procurement spend in 2017 was R6.1 billion and is expected to rise to R6.3bn by the end of 2018. Since 65 percent of its raw materials are sourced locally this means its local procurement contribution is set to rise by about R100m this year.

Edcon has prioritised the focus on further increasing local content which was at 38 percent in 2015 and is currently at 53 percent and plans to grow the workforce at its Celrose and Eddels plants from 1 970 to 2 350 in the next six months.

In addition, through their Orange Unite programme, they provide skills training and work opportunities to women who are survivors of gender-based violence.

Their Design Innovation Challenge identifies young designers, offering them a learning platform to hone their design as well as entrepreneurial skills, which for many leads to fulltime employment and for others to becoming employers themselves.

Edcon’s work with the Sustainable Cotton Cluster has assisted in the revival of the country’s cotton farmers as well as skills, including weaving and dyeing.

Mondi spends 95 percent of its budget on local suppliers and is working to trial and develop many of their raw material suppliers to replace current imported products. These and many more companies have pledged to growing local procurement right through their supply chain.

This is a small overview of what these companies are doing, and many more have made similar commitments, walking the talk of localisation towards re-industrialisation in order to retain and create jobs.

The Jobs Summit announced that it would form a monitoring unit to report back on progress going forward, and Proudly South African will form its own monitoring team to keep track of the commitments made by these and other companies and will feed this information into the summit’s own unit.

We commit, during our annual Buy Local Summit, on March 13, 2019, to give a full report back on progress made by corporate South Africa between now and then.

The Jobs Summit called for clear and measurable solutions to the unemployment crisis facing our country.

We believe that it provided these, and now it is up to all of us to put South Africa first. We have heeded the president’s call for him to send us and so there is only one song for this column, and that is Bra Hugh’s