Community development is everything SANRAL does beyond building and maintaining roads. It’s about delivering services in the wider sense, said SANRAL CEO Skhumbuzo Macozoma. “We have technical excellence when it comes to building roads. But people are asking: ‘How is this relevant to me? How do I benefit? How is it changing my life?’ This is so important that it will now be our focus to demonstrate that relevance,” he said.
The agency will expand and intensify its community development programmes, from which local people will benefit. This means prioritising SMMEs, with a focus on local ones with black and female owners, hiring local labour, training the labour and increasing the skill levels of SMME personnel.
This is true of all road projects. In every case, communities will be engaged to establish what their needs are. There will also be stand-alone projects, again with community involvement. In addition, SANRAL will maintain its scholarship
programme for schools – not just to increase the number of engineers, but because South Africa needs more learners to make it through school so that they can move on to tertiary studies.
Equally it will maintain its bursary programme for students, more narrowly focused on producing engineers – again, not just for SANRAL, but for the country. This is also true of its internship programme and its Technical Excellence Academy in Port Elizabeth, where engineering graduates are given the opportunity to get hands-on experience, the necessary registration at professional level and become better able to serve their communities and the country as a whole.
SANRAL’s approach, explained Macozoma, is based on the view that it hasa wider role in society. It is committed to the social goals of the government, including economic transformation and the building of a more equal, cohesive society. It therefore uses every procurement opportunity to advance these objectives.
SANRAL visited local SMMEs in KwaMhlanga, located next to the R573 Moloto Road, to discuss transformation of the construction industry and job creation for local communities on road construction projects. The roads agency embarked on a countrywide roadshow to explain its new long-term strategy – Horizon 2030 – and draft Transformation Policy in November 2017. Since then it has hosted some 40 sessions in all nine provinces and informed communities about opportunities for joint ventures with small and medium enterprises.
More than 150 members of the community, small business owners, entrepreneurs and
community leaders attended the event and had the opportunity to raise concerns regarding projects in the region.
“SANRAL used this event to update smaller contractors and local communities on how they can participate in road construction projects – not only on the Moloto project but also on future SANRAL activities,” said Ismail Essa, the Transformation Manager at SANRAL.
This is part of the agency’s vision of empowering small businesses and affording them an opportunity to grow and contribute to infrastructure development and growing the economy.
