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, obtain 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 has a 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.