HELPING OUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

Siyakhulu Rural Women Trust

Africas Best Foods Ltd is proud to be a sponsor for the Siyakhulu Rural Women Trust, providing food, clothing and work for the impoverished women living in the rural areas of Mpumalanga.

Siyakhulu Rural Women Trust (“Siyakhulu”) was born of a desire by local agricultural processors to provide the communities that comprised their staff with substantive empowerment opportunities.

The Trust made a concerted effort to steer clear of the pitfalls of “tokenism” empowerment, for the benefit of a few, already wealthy individuals. Instead, it developed a strategy to provide real and practical empowerment for members of the surrounding communities.

Their mission is to transform the communities in which we operate by providing rural women with substantive, practical empowerment.

They do this in a number of different ways, including the stimulation of local rural economies and entrepreneurship,

Growing a lasting relationship with the people…

Africas Best Foods Ltd offers permanent and seasonal work to the women in the rural areas of Mpumalanga and the Southern Drakensburg in South Africa. It creates dozens of Micro enterprises by sustaining rural women, who are often the bread winners in their families . This encourages rural women, who are often the bread winners in their families, to band together into income producing groups.

These groups are involved in the harvesting of mushrooms during the rainy season, which takes place between October and May each year. During this period, Africas Best Foods Ltd also organizes the deployment, collection and purchasing of the mushrooms that are harvested on a daily basis. In this way, we are able to ensure a safe working environment as well as provide a steady stream of income for the families living in these impoverished areas.

In addition to the harvesting operations described above, during the 2017/2018 season, Africas Best Foods Ltd created 30 permanent jobs and 150 seasonal jobs at our factory in Amsterdam, Mpumalanga and Underberg, Kwazulu Natal. Additional harvesting operations also lead to the creation of jobs for drivers, supervisors and machine operators and refrigeration and maintenance technicians.