“This recognition is especially pleasing as it shows an appreciation of the CSI fund and trust management that has been undertaken by Tshikululu on behalf of major South African corporations for the past 12 years”, notes Henry. “Gratifying too is that it should be made for the work of our not-for-profit company, despite our being bracketed with top range financial services institutions.”

Tshikululu managed R495 million of corporate social investment funds in 2009, and acts as grantmaker manager to community development initiatives throughout South Africa. Clients whose CSI trusts are managed include Anglo American, De Beers, the FirstRand Group, Discovery, and UTi.

This work saw Tshikululu undertake 241 individual project site visits last year, and process more than 3 000 applications for NGO funding. Tshikululu is South Africa’s largest private sector vehicle for corporate social investment grantmaking.

For SA policy makers pressured to put the economy onto a stronger job growth trajectory, meeting ambitious climate-change goals will add to a tricky balancing act.

This is an extract from an article written by Carol Paton for the Financial Mail, published in the 30 July 2010 edition and online on 29 July 2010.

On December 6 last year, just before President Jacob Zuma jetted off to Copenhagen to meet 110 other heads of state, his office issued a press statement: South Africa would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2020, and by 42% by 2025. Emissions were expected to rise until 2020, when they would peak, plateau for a decade, and then decline in absolute terms.

As the summit unfolded it became clear what must have happened: just as developing countries wanted to pressure developed countries into binding targets, the richer nations wanted the same from the emerging world. Allied with emerging powerhouses China, India and Brazil — which had all come forward and made pledges — and eager to play in the major league, SA had to commit to targets even if it did so in a rush and without a plan on how it would do it.

Therein lie the problems. SA’s commitment to an ambitious target will motivate more and bigger mitigating actions, which will be good for SA’s competitiveness in the long run. But the targets are far away from commercial and macroeconomic reality. Unlike China, India and Brazil, whose booming economies mean abundant resources are available for mitigation actions, the SA state does not have similar affluence.

What will the targets mean for the economy and business?

SA has a dirty economy, given its historical dependence on cheap coal to generate electricity. On a per capita basis, GHG emissions in SA are as much as the UK’s and close to Germany’s, despite being a smaller economy. Though the last GHG inventory in SA has the year 2000 as a baseline, it is now estimated that in terms of scale, the SA economy emits 500Mt of carbon dioxide in a year.

The Energy Research Centre (ERC) is the group that did the technical work that informed the 34% target. Three years ago the centre was asked by the then minister of environmental affairs & tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, to develop a set of long-term mitigation scenarios.

As it happened, there were significant differences between what in 2007 was assumed would happen and what is believed will happen now. For example, the growth assumptions in the “business as usual trajectory” were very bullish. As the economy slowed quite unexpectedly from 2009, it’s likely that the actual emissions were not as high as expected. But the 34% target remained.

A second difference was that much of what businesses like Eskom and Sasol believed was possible was based on the assumption that technology to do carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) — which amounts to capturing emissions, turning them into solid form and then burying them in the ground or in sludge dams — would be well-developed. But though CCS pilot projects have begun, the technology is a long way from being established.

In short, how SA will reach its 34% mitigation target from “business as usual” by 2020 is vague. Two processes are under way in government that will begin to tackle this. The first is to compile the climate change green paper, and then the white paper that will lead to legislation. The second is the compilation of the second Integrated Resource Plan (IRP2) by the department of energy, which will determine what SA’s energy mix will be for the next 25 years.

Trade & industry minister Rob Davies is looking to new green industries as job creators. The problem is that SA’s industrial policy aims to put SA on a path on which it beneficiates its mineral resources. Beneficiation is not compatible with a low-carbon future.

For SA policy makers pressured to put the economy onto a stronger job growth trajectory and speed up the delivery of social services, meeting ambitious climate-change goals will add to an already tricky balancing act.

Read the full article at the Financial Mail.

In South Africa, the government is still unable to ensure that the 12- million-odd pupils in public schools get all the textbooks they need. Only 14,8% of households, and only 33% of schools, have computers that are used for teaching and learning.

However, a University of SA survey of Gauteng high school pupils showing 75,4% access the internet via cellphones, suggests the ability to open a textbook using a device many pupils have opens up great possibilities.

Star Schools, which provides extra tuition to 37000 children nationally, and 22000 by distance tuition, is to launch this technology nationally through its technology division, My Star, next month . The system will also allow children to pay only for the parts of the e-books they need .

Maths teacher Guy Hees, who moderated Star Schools’ maths e-book, says while the new technology has not yet been widely used, or stood the test of a matric exam, he expects it to be “hugely effective”. Children like modern technology that is “accessible 24/7” , he says. “They can hugely benefit from this … at this stage, there are universities in the US, but not schools, that are using this type of technology,” says Prof Hees, who taught in a Los Angeles district five years ago.

English teacher Karen Ehlers, who has used the Grade 11 English First Additional Language e-book , says her pupils have welcomed it . “They love it. They are excited and they want to come to class…. It’s not chalk and talk any more, they want interactivity.”

Read the full article at Business Day.

The theme of the AU meeting was “Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa”, so it was an apt opportunity to wave the flag. “Nutrition is practically an orphan,” Mkandawire commented. About 40 percent of children younger than five in Africa are chronically malnourished.

The food price crisis of 2006-08 pushed the number of malnourished children to shocking levels and put a new focus on nutrition.

Africa’s efforts to deal with malnutrition and hunger have been dismal. Only nine African countries are on track to meet the UN Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger and malnutrition by 2015, according to a 2009 report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

More than 70 percent of Africa’s population is rural and depends on agriculture for food and income, so the solution to food security seems easy and logical: people can grow enough nutritious food to feed themselves.

Yet Africa has some of the world’s highest levels of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, especially among pre-school aged children: about 68 percent suffer from anaemia caused by a lack of iron, found in green leafy vegetables like spinach; up to 40 percent lack vitamin A, found in vegetables like carrots and pumpkins.

Overall, around 40 percent of Africa’s population suffer from iodine deficiency, which can be corrected by adding a pinch of iodated salt to the diet. A lack of iron and iodine affect the mental growth of a child; vitamin A is critical to the immune system and can reduce the risk of dying from illnesses by nearly 23 percent, according to UNICEF.

Knowing the problem and the solution is only half the job. Most experts at the event agreed that nutrition could not get the attention it deserved if it remained closeted in health ministries.

At the end of the three-hour long session, key messages were put together for political leaders. When the AU assembly opened the following day, no political leader mentioned nutrition in their address. The main theme – maternal and infant health – got little mention. A substantial portion of the speeches were devoted to the conflicts raging in the continent.

Mkandawire added optimistically, “We just need the political will to drive the process, and it can happen.”

Read the complete article at  IrinPlus News.

South Africa’s testing campaign is one element of the country’s dramatic reorientation of its HIV policy. It aims to help the country to provide treatment to 80% of people in need by 2011, by encouraging take-up of voluntary testing at existing health facilities, routinely offering HIV tests at both inpatient and outpatient facilities and organising ‘testing days’ in specific districts. Health workers have been reallocated from other duties or brought out of retirement.

Heywood made it clear that he thinks the testing campaign is justifiable and necessary. As well as having the potential to reduce the number of people starting treatment at very low CD4 counts, the programme will also offer people health screening for other conditions and link people to health services they need.

Moreover, he said the programme has been an opportunity to kick start long overdue changes in the country’s health system. Stronger infrastructure and task shifting has been necessary for the campaign to be successful.

However, he has a number of concerns. “From a human rights perspective, there is no monitoring at all of what we can call adverse events,” he said. “There is no system to monitor whether a person who is diagnosed with HIV then suffers discrimination, suffers violence or gains access to treatment.”

He said that research has already shown that HIV counselling and testing is frequently poorly delivered, with breaches in the protocols of how testing should be delivered. In many cases, the poor physical infrastructure of healthcare facilities made it extremely challenging to provide a confidential service.

The testing campaign is only a means to an end, he said. Its intention is to give people access to treatment and to other healthcare services. However, if treatment is not actually provided, then the means cannot be justified, he concluded.

Read the full article at Aidsmap.

A webcast of this session is available on the website of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Children were paying the price for the country’s failure to progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aimed to reduce poverty, hunger and disease by 2015 and to ensure children’s rights to survival, health and development, it said.

The report found that while South Africa was making progress on a number of MDGs, the targets for reducing child hunger, HIV, tuberculosis and child mortality were not being met.

Over one in three children did not have access to basic sanitation or adequate drinking water on site.

The growth of nearly one in five children was stunted, according to the most recent national food consumption survey in 2005.

Mortality audits by the Child Healthcare Problem Identification Programme indicated that more than 60 percent of children who died in hospital between 2005 and 2007 were underweight.

Director of Management Sciences for Health in SA, Nomathemba Mazaleni said community-based services were important in improving healthcare for children.

Community health workers were being trained, in rural areas where clinics were faraway, in preventing and treating childhood illness, and were trained to recognise when to seek emergency care, she said.

Given sufficient funding, these initiatives should have a positive impact on child health.

Read more at Independent Online.

Health and Social Development MEC Qedani Mahlangu has ordered that all clinics should provide the treatment by September, in line with the new treatment guidelines that came into effect in April. ARV treatment was previously available in hospitals and community health centres.

“The provision of anti-retroviral therapy in clinics will make treatment easily accessible to the community and will contribute to the saving of lives,” said Mahlangu.

To date 295 785 (including 22 830 children) patients are currently on treatment in the province with about a million more having being assessed and will gradually be brought into the treatment programme.

In June over 30 more clinics started providing treatment. These include Lenasia; Diepkloof; Tladi; Orlando and Boipatong.

By the end of July treatment will be available at Bristlecone, Barney Molokoana, Michael Maponya, Itireleng, Greenvillage, Protea South, Eldorado Park, Kocksoord, Fochville, Martinutz, Rietvalley, and Toekomsrus.

Treatment will also be available at the Boitumelo, Vosloorus, Calcot Dlephu, Phillip Moyo, Spartan, Mamelodi West, Holani,Karen Park, Plot 175 clinic, De Wagensdrift, Refiloe, Rethabiseng, Ubuntu Day, Onverwacht, Ekangala and Bronkhorstspruit clinics.

Action needs to be taken to eradicate HIV/Aids, not just treat its victims or attempt to control its spread.

John R. Talbott is the bestselling author of eight books on economics and politics that have accurately detailed and predicted the causes and devastating effects of the current financial crisis. In 2007, Talbott authored two articles on achieving Aids prevention and the need for confidential and compulsory universal testing in the most infected countries after having spent three months living in Aids-ravaged Botswana. This article was first published by Huffington Post.

A vaginal gel applied by women prior to sexual encounters has been found in a double blind field test conducted in South Africa to reduce AIDS infection rates by 39%. Upon first hearing this, it would be natural to conclude that use of this gel would reduce reported cases of AIDS in Africa by 39%; or, if you were a woman living in Africa you might conclude that use of this gel might dramatically help you from getting infected in the future. You would not be alone in thinking this was a groundbreaking discovery as the announcement of these test results brought a standing ovation from the audience of scientists and NGO’ers at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

But, do we really understand the significance of this test’s actual reported results? As we all know, statistics can be used in very creative ways that sometimes misleads the reader as to the effectiveness of a new drug or procedure.

It turns out that the test did result in 39% fewer infections, per year. The annual incidence rate for the treated group was 5.6 % more infections per year, while the control group that was administered a placebo experienced an annual rate of new infections of 9.1%. 5.6% is indeed 39% lower than 9.1%, in percentage terms, but sometimes measuring things in percentage terms can be deceiving.

In fact, when one looks behind the percentages at the actual numbers of people tested in the study the story is much less convincing. This was a very small test with only 843 women completing the study and they were evenly split between a treated group and a placebo, or control group that received no treatment. The actual number of new infections then were 38 women in the treated group and 60 women in the control group in a little over a year. You can see that there was a difference of only 22 women infected between the two groups, a very small number, especially relative to the 22 million of Africans who are infected with HIV/AIDS. If as few as ten less women in the control group had not contracted the disease, the study would have reported a minor 24 % decline in incidence and the entire story would have lost its newsworthiness.

Second, even with these reported lower rates of incidence of 39%, this improvement is an annual figure. The study does not say that over your lifetime you will be 39% less likely to get AIDS with this treatment, only that at the end of one year, you will have a 39% better chance of having not contracted it.

If you look over a woman’s entire sexually active lifetime of, say twenty years, say age 15 to age 35 in Africa, even the treated women in this study in this highly infected AIDS environment would end up with over 70% of their members becoming infected. The good news is that the treated women do better than the untreated, the bad news is that 5.6% of them are still getting infected every year and this compounds to infection rates of over 70% of the entire population over a sexually active lifetime. Yes, the non-treated will see infection rates of over 85% over their lifetimes, but is this really as big a difference as the news headlines and news stories suggest. It is sort of like saying that smoking cigarettes is 39% safer per year than smoking crack, but what difference does that make if both end up killing you in the end.

Finally, for those of you who have not understood what moral hazard is when discussed in the financial crisis literature, here is a beautiful example. South Africa has announced they do not want to wait for more and bigger studies or for FDA approval, they want to immediately pursue distributing the gel to their female population as soon as possible. But, have they thought this through? What if as a result of the women in South Africa using this gel before intercourse, their boyfriends or husbands decide it is not necessary to use a condom. Condoms have been found to be very strong preventative measures against AIDS transmission, so if condom usage declined by just 30% it would completely wipe out any reported benefit associated with this new gel.

UNAIDS and the WHO are anxious to report some success in their fight against AIDS given that their attempts at finding a vaccine so far have failed and their donors are getting impatient. To date, they are betting on this gel for women and circumcision for men as tools to prevent AIDS transmission. But, their circumcision studies suffer the same problem with statistics that this gel study has, a 50% reported reduction in annual transmission rates with circumcision does not mean you will be 50% less likely to get the illness over your lifetime, just 50% less likely to be ill at the end of the first year. Because people have many sexual encounters over many years, such reductions in annual infection rates will do little to reduce the incidence of AIDS in Africa over a lifetime. In addition, the circumcision field studies are suspect because for obvious reasons it was impossible to conduct double blind experiments when circumcision is the treatment being examined, men have a way of knowing if their genitals have been cut and so may change behavior accordingly.

Because the infection rates in many Southern African nations have reached epidemic proportions with more than 20% to 25% of all adults becoming infected, I concluded that these highly infected nations should institute universal, compulsory, but confidential testing of all of their citizens over the age of 12. While you might argue that patient rights are violated by such compulsory testing, this minor social cost is more than outweighed by the social benefit of stopping an indiscriminate killer in the community. Once people know their status, they can act accordingly, or anti-viral drugs can be taken to dramatically lower the transmission rates and hopefully, over time, completely eradicate this scourge of death on the continent of Africa. Action needs to be taken to eradicate this killer, not just treat its victims or attempt to control its spread.

Dr Mamphela Ramphele, chairwoman of government’s Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) said TIA’s affiliate, LifeLab, would work with the private sector to produce the gel containing tenofovir for further use.

Pharmaceutical company Gilead owns the patent for tenofovir, but donated 21kg of the active ingredients of the antiretroviral (ARV) to the South African study. A research company, Conrad, then made the gel for the South African study.

The researchers, all from the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in SA (Caprisa), say another independent study is necessary to test whether the tenofovir gel could work in other areas.

Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi said the government “will do everything in our power to take this forward and to make sure that everyone in our country and in the world, benefits from this study”.

“Women bear the brunt of this epidemic and all our weapons so far, have been weapons controlled by men,” he told the International Aids conference in Vienna this week.

“The condom is only used when men want. The female condom is also only used when men want. With male circumcision, again, it is young men who are protected. So, for the first time, we are dealing with the missing link.”

Read more at Independent Online.

For many companies, corporate social investment means writing out cheques. These companies fulfil their corporate social investment requirements but have little real involvement in the initiatives which they fund.

But the partnership approach, whereby companies approach corporate social investment in a far more consultative manner, means greater involvement on the company’s part, and usually results in more sustainable solutions for its beneficiaries.

As I grew up in the townships, and still know many people who live in underserved areas, it is only logical to me that you should consult with the intended beneficiaries about the fundamental issues and the solutions they may have.

Using the partnership approach, companies talk to and listen to the communities, understand the intricacies of each of their initiatives and then design solutions for the communities, rather than imposing solutions created by companies or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs).

There is no doubt that the partnership approach takes far more time to set up, implement and follow through. But it also ensures the beneficiaries are more likely to be able to look after themselves .

Using this approach, it is often easier for companies to gain a deeper understanding of their particular areas of involvement, if they choose only a few areas of specialisation on which to focus.

At FirstRand, we have taken a programmatic approach in which we have reduced the number of focus areas so we can spend more time and money on selected ones and defined programmes within those areas. We have 12 programmes at the moment and have committed to all of them for the next few years so we can really get to know each other and build trust with our beneficiaries.

As a large company, we are able to have a properly staffed department focusing only on corporate social investment. We also use an NGO, which has developed a great deal of knowledge and community experience in our areas of focus and speaks for communities that may not be able to speak for themselves.

NGOs play an important role as the intermediary between the company and communities in terms of fundraising and initiating proposals. Companies should negotiate with the NGOs they deal with to ensure their funds are spent in the best possible way. Some NGOs have created bureaucratic structures that detract from serving the needs of the communities. By negotiating with them, companies can ensure that these structures are removed.

It is also important to be patient as many corporate social investment programmes take many years to show results.

Companies need to be dedicated to their programmes for the long term. For example, improving the quality of education cannot happen overnight; it will take many years. We have found, over the past three years, our involvement in the education sector has given us a far greater understanding of the problems it endures and we have been able to pilot a number of innovations from which we are still getting results.

We have also found our involvement in agricultural livelihoods has meant that local communities have once again started living off the land, rather than relying on social grants. By establishing a level of trust, introducing best practices and working closely with the communities, we have been able to show them that agricultural enterprises can help alleviate poverty.

By becoming involved in such consultative ways, business can play a role that shows it does not exist only to make profits but also to ensure the environment in which it operates is sustainable for the long term.