Our communities

We recognise our responsibilities as a member of the communities in which we operate and encourage our businesses to engage with their local communities as and how they wish, as set out below. However, the group’s contribution to communities comes principally via the Garfield Weston Foundation, which was set up by the late W. Garfield Weston in 1958.

It is one of the UK’s foremost philanthropic organisations and derives a substantial proportion of its funds from its interests in the group’s ultimate holding company, Wittington Investments Limited. More detail can be found at www.garfieldweston.org

Four of the six countries in which Illovo operates are classified by the UN as Least Developed Countries. Consistent with Illovo’s strategy of being a long-term investor in the communities in which it operates, it has an active social investment programme structured to address the specific needs of those communities. During 2010, the business contributed over £10m towards the provision of housing, including water, electricity, road maintenance and sanitation; hospitals and clinics; education and community outreach programmes, for the benefit of employees and local communities.

This amount was directed as follows:

In Malawi, Zambia, Swaziland, Tanzania and Mozambique, Illovo participates in the upgrading of schools and assists in their administration and management in an effort to improve education delivery. 27 schools in these five countries currently benefit from this type of support. In South Africa, Illovo undertakes local community projects to improve facilities at schools in the communities in which it has agricultural and manufacturing operations. It also supports education-related initiatives, such as Rally to Read, a literacy-based development programme co-ordinated by the National READ Educational Trust.

Illovo undertakes a wide range of community-based projects each year, for example, the construction at Big Bend in Swaziland, of new police offices which were handed over to the Swaziland police services during the past year.

British Sugar has played an instrumental role in supporting the Snibston Discovery Museum in the East Midlands to preserve ancient timbers that once spanned the River Trent. Rescue excavations at Hemington Quarry, Leicestershire, between 1993 and 1998 revealed three successive medieval bridges preserved beneath gravel bar deposits and alluvium. The timbers include the only surviving example of an 11th century bridge across a major river and the most complete Norman timber structure in Britain.

Following their excavation, the timbers have been undergoing an innovative conservation process. Over the past 14 years, the bridge timbers have been immersed in a sucrose solution supplied by British Sugar. Excited by the technical challenge of preserving these rare medieval timbers, since 1996 British Sugar has donated around 70 tonnes of liquid sugar to Leicestershire County Council to undertake this process.

For more than 50 years, Azucarera has organised residential summer camps for its employees’ children from across its factories and head office. The camps cater for around 90 children and last for just over two weeks. The children, aged between 8 and 15, stay in a variety of locations and take part in a range of outdoor activities. This year, Azucarera contributed £94,000 to the camp which is an important part of the company’s ethos of supporting its workforce.

In November 2009, 108 miners were killed in an underground explosion at the Hegang coal mine in Heilongjiang, China. As committed employers in the region, notwithstanding the mine was unrelated to our operations, British Sugar together with AB Mauri and AB Agri made a £92,000 donation to set up a fund to help support the education of children orphaned by the accident.

Vivergo has invested substantial time in a number of local community projects:

• £20,000 was raised through a number of employee-organised fund-raising initiatives for the KIDS charity which provides support to families with children who have learning difficulties. £5,000 of this was donated by the company;
• several contractors on the project donated time and materials to build a conservatory at a local respite home and a Vivergo team spent a day doing a makeover of the garden;
• Vivergo is spending £25,000 planting trees in the local area; and
• Vivergo has established a community forum to engage the local town and village councils in what it is are doing and help them to understand what is being built by Vivergo and why.

Twinings has been working with Save the Children since 2004, helping to improve the lives of children in tea-growing communities in China. Twinings and its employees have donated £1.1m to support a range of projects, from helping disabled children to gain vital life skills to setting up centres for children to learn and play. Achievements so far include:

Training teachers in Yunnan

With Twinings’ support, Save the Children has trained over 10,000 teachers in Yunnan, south west China. This has given more than 300,000 schoolchildren the chance to learn in more engaging and interactive ways, and has helped improve enrolment and attendance rates.

Caring for disabled children

In Anhui, eastern China, the business has supported projects to improve the care of 1,800 disabled children. More than 1,000 teachers and 200 parents have received training in the best ways to care for, and communicate with, disabled children.

Educating children about HIV/Aids

With Twinings’ help, Save the Children has taught 250,000 children and teenagers in Yunnan about HIV/Aids. In Long Chuan county, Save the Children has set up activity and support centres for children and parents affected by HIV/Aids. Run by local volunteers, these centres teach people about health and nutrition, and give children a safe place to play and learn.

So far, through Twinings’ support of Save the Children over half a million children have been helped and this support continues. It is working with Save the Children on new projects that will improve health and nutrition education for children in Yunnan and Shanghai, and is also increasingly working with Save the Children to support the communities involved in growing and picking its tea.

To find out more about Save the Children’s work, visit www.savethechildren.org.uk

“Mary’s Meals is an international movement run by Scottish charity Scottish International Relief in 15 countries. Our biggest programme is in Malawi, where we arrange for nearly 350,000 of the most vulnerable children to receive a meal at school every school day.

We select the most vulnerable schools and develop strong working relationships with each head teacher. We work through Parent Teacher Associations, whose members cook the corn soya blend porridge (called ‘likuni phala’ in Malawi) and serve it to the schoolchildren. The nutritional content of the porridge meets the standards of the World Food Programme, and the taste is familiar to the children. Mary’s Meals trains the volunteers to cook it and provides a new kitchen building, a stove (also made in Malawi) and firewood for each school.

By providing school meals we encourage more children to enrol in primary school and attend more regularly which helps them achieve better academic results. The results are impressive: we regularly see annual increases of over 5% in their enrolment, attendance and the results they achieve.

In 2009/10, Illovo donated the sugar for the likuni phala, to the value of £42,000, together with accommodation for the Mary’s Meals country director, access to hotel accommodation for visitors, and good quality advice from professionals on matters such as human resources. Two Illovo staff also give their time as very active board members of Mary’s Meals Malawi, helping with visa applications, meetings with government and providing management advice.

In 2009/10, Mary’s Meals took part in a six-month Leadership Development Programme with five senior executives from businesses within the Associated British Foods group. We set them the task of researching ‘cause-related marketing’ (CRM), to help us understand how we can draw upon a marketing/fund-raising opportunity which many companies and charities are embracing and which satisfies the demands of an increasingly ethically minded public. The consultancy work they produced was entirely free and of an exceptionally high standard. At the conclusion, we received a bound document which is now our CRM bible. It was invaluable to have people of such high calibre supporting us in what is an important, but complex, area.”

Cathy Ratcliff,
Head of Overseas Programmes,
Mary’s Meals