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'Strength in Togetherness'
Creating Value & Building Relationships.
As one of East Africa’s leading precious metals companies, we are focused on creating value for all of our stakeholders including providing employment opportunities and driving economic growth wherever we operate. As part of making a valuable contribution as community partners, we seek meaningful long-term relationships that respect local cultures and create lasting benefits. We aim to support the development of diversified and resilient local economies that contribute to improving the quality of life that continues beyond the life of our operations.
We base our relationships on open communication, trust, and mutual respect to achieve a clear understanding of the context and impacts of our operations. Our approach also informs how we can make a meaningful contribution to economic and social development in our communities.We strongly believe that the community is vital to our success. Our growth and success are dependent on our employees and the people we partner with around the country. There is no “us” and “them”, only “together”. We encourage collaboration, commitment, and creativity in an environment that promotes safety, health, and welfare – and where respect and equality are prerequisites. We know that our highly qualified workforce will become the industry leaders of tomorrow.
Community Engagement Programs
Many of our community engagement programs focus on local economic development, including our agriculture and portable skills programs, designed to create jobs outside of mining and ensure the long-term sustainability of current mining communities. We believe that our mining improves lives. Our community engagement initiatives seek to create enduring and sustainable value for our host communities both during and after the operating lives of our mines.
Effective community engagement requires a dynamic and evolving process of stakeholder engagement and a commitment to partnering with governments and other organizations. We engage meaningfully, as much as possible with our stakeholders, to ensure we are in a better position to understand their perceptions of value and deliver accordingly. We have developed a stakeholder perception index which is helping us to identify and address specific challenges, including employment, legacy issues and transparency, and local procurement opportunities. Our process of stakeholder engagement is designed to respect local customs, traditions, and cultures while encouraging open, honest, and constructive dialogue.
Clean Water Project
Our mines are usually deep in remote rural areas without access to clean piped water. Overtime when the mines flourish, we are tasked with ensuring that our communities have access to safe water, and build their capacity to maintain their safe water sources for years to come. We construct wells or boreholes to access groundwater, train the community on how to maintain, and occasionally inspect them for repair our selves.
Education
Our vision is for all children in host communities to have access to excellent education and training.
To meet our current and future skill requirements, we invest in our existing employees, future employees, and in the communities that provide our labor. We invest in training and development programs, leadership, and portable technical and vocational skills training and education and research programs at universities that help strengthen the workforce in the communities where we operate. Our education, bursary, and skills development initiatives are geared towards empowering local community members to compete for positions within our company.
Africa’s mining regions are notorious for employing child labor in mines. This is most evident in families whose financial circumstances cannot afford them school dues forcing their children into mining practices to earn the extra income. So children chased from school for such dues end up getting into mines in search of a quick buck. Our approach to alleviating this problem has been through educating such families about the dangers of child labor, offering half or full bursaries for promising students, and assured bursaries for the first two children of our employees.
Our vision is for all children in host communities to have access to excellent education and training. We partner with other schools for the bursaries and in other communities where the members have no means to pay school fees, we set up "no-fee" schools, although such schools simply don’t have the full resources that many other do.
We have also partnered with academic institutions through our bursary program to support our income challenged workers, especially single mothers in the mining industry take their children to school. This in its self is an attempt rallying against child labor in local mines where children who cannot meet school dues are forced to work in local mines by their parents to make ends meet.
In 2019, we focused on education and infrastructure projects in our operational territories. In Mubende, for example, our education enhancement programs benefited 150 learners and 28 teachers at a total cost of 22million Uganda Shillings.
