By Chesney Bradshaw
ABB South Africa’s sustainability programme supports a range of social development projects to reach out and touch the lives of the needy and most vulnerable in communities and develop much needed technical skills.
ABB’s corporate social investment programme rests on three important cornerstones: technical skills development, care for orphans of HIV/AIDS; and protection of the environment particularly through energy efficiency.
Skills development has always been important to ABB as it is a leading power and automation company. Over the past two years ABB South Africa has employed a number of young engineers providing them with the opportunity for training and development.
Recognizing the skills shortages and its impact on economic growth, ABB has embarked on a programme with the Swiss South African Co-operation Initiative (SSACI) to support the development of technical skills at colleges in South Africa known as Further Education Training (FET) colleges. On one level the programme will provide college students with excellent working experience in a modern international engineering workplace. At another, the programme gives college lecturers the opportunity to attend ABB’s leading technology courses to update industry relevant knowledge.
The FET project supported by ABB is helping to bridge the gap between tertiary college educational institutions and industry. Research by government and the NBI (National the Business Institute) found that colleges were not matching skills to industry needs. The programme will help to close this gap. It will also help to increase the chances of young technical graduates finding employment in industry.
ABB South Africa has for a number of years supported HIV/AIDS programmes as well as run its own VCT (voluntary counseling and testing) programmes. Because of the massive scale of the pandemic in the country ABB in 2006 decided to intensify its efforts to support HIV/AIDS orphans.
To reach communities, ABB has teamed up with non-governmental and community-based organisations such as Noah and Starfish Greathearts Foundation as well as others. ABB now supports about 1000 children orphaned from HIV/AIDS in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. ABB’s contributions help to provide registration of orphans, feeding, clothing, schooling and placement with foster parents. Another important part of the programme is to train foster parents to care for the various socio-psychological needs of the children.
Employees have been so touched by this programme that many have volunteered their time to go into communities and help. They have painted a community centre, held year-end parties for the children and collected books and clothing for them. ABB encourages this spirit of volunteerism which reflects its company values of respect, responsibility and determination.
Our environment is under siege: it is being polluted, contaminated and even destroyed because of rapid and massive urbanization and industrialisation. ABB has environmental programmes throughout its operations. Environmental education is vital to help learners make a positive contribution to their local environments and support the environmental message. ABB is supporting a programme run by the WWF (World wide Fund for Nature) called the Eco-schools project which aims to encourage and reward schools for their environmental and energy efficiency programmes.
The three cornerstones of ABB’s corporate social responsibility programme – technical skills development, care of orphans of HIV/AIDS and environmental education and energy efficiency -- are vitally important. A thread running through all ABB’s corporate social investment projects is support of the youth. ABB is helping to address some of the challenges that face the youth of today as well as plant seeds to build a better future for future generations.