Corporate Social Investment Portfolio of African Access HoldingsAfrican Access aims to bring the previously disadvantaged communities into the mainstream of the economy with focus and emphasis on empowering and educating women and youth. “Just as a large company seeks to conserve its assets and its future survival by reinvesting part of its profits, so it should seek to conserve and improve the social environment in which it does business, in the hope that it will be able to continue to do business in the future, preferably in a better environment than it has at present” GIVEN our history and legacy, African Access does not operate in a corporate vacuum in the new South Africa. As a new generation South African company, African Access has solid community connectivity, firmly believing that its emerging blue-chip status is consistent with its philosophy to grow communities and deliver social responsibility to disadvantaged communities. Outside the boardroom negotiations, securing of new business bottom lines and growing the company, African Access has a broad-brush policy of serving the communities across South Africa. African Access has given new meaning to the social mantra – “A Corporate With A Heart” – and since its formation in 2003, the company’s leadership has been adding value to the communities they had come from. From mentoring black-owned SMMEs, sponsoring educational bursaries to children from indigent communities in Kwa-Zulu Natal, equipping school laboratories with computers to creating jobs every day, empowering women-inspired enterprises and making the dream of a young woman come true on the opera stage, African Access is ahead in the corporate social responsibility stakes. People with disabilities have also benefited from the company’s care, mentorship and custody project, and various other projects.. The Mathew Goniwe Cradock Four Trust is close to the heart of this corporate. African Access continues to salute these four brave young South Africans who were brutalized by apartheid in their fight against racism and oppression with its gesture of an annual R1-million grant to boost economic development and skills training. At the same time funding is spent on sports and recreational development in the community. The company has also left its CSR legacy at Cornerstone, a premier Christian College in the Western Cape, aimed at training students from a Biblical World-View to leadership maturity. Women empowerment and gender equality are crucial to the company’s CSR campaign, having contributed R300 000 to the 50thAnniversary of the 1956 Women's March to Pretoria. A similar grant was given to the people of Soweto during the anniversary of the 1976 June 16 uprising against apartheid education. The youth therefore forms another important component in the CSR roll-out as African Access holds dearly the welfare of women and children. The Cotlands child-care project, the Robben Island Museum & Heritage Site and the learner-driver-programme rounds off the CSR outreach in which African Access invests millions of rands each year in redefining the human landscape of a country faced with huge transformational challenges. At African Access, we believe our corporate growth, viability, sustainability and profitability complements our commitment to community, because we believe that..
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