Catalysing positive socio-economic change: Gao Mothoagae, Vice President of Corporate Social Investment & Sasol Foundation

Jun 13, 2024 10:41:49 AM

"The Sasol Foundation is roughly 14 years old and they have really delivered some phenomenal achievements in terms of STEM education, working on textbooks with the Department of Education, translating them, and making sure that we bring education to life."

By Fiona Wakelin & Koketso Mamabolo

The Top Empowered Socio-Economic Development Award recognises organisations doing their bit to improve the lives of disadvantaged communities, going beyond merely allocating funds towards social investment. Sasol took the accolade home at the 2023 Top Empowerment Awards and driving their social impact initiatives is Gao Mothoagae, Vice President of Corporate Social Investment and the Sasol Foundation. We sat down with her to find out about their award-winning work.

Congratulations on winning the Top Empowered Socio-Economic Development award for 2023. What did winning the award mean for you?

As an individual I was super excited. As a leader, I was extremely proud. You know they say it takes a village? Delivering impact takes a community. So there's nothing that I can say that I did on my own or that anyone on my team did on their own. Really it's about collaborative effort. And it's great to be recognised for the collaborative effort that has delivered this award for us. But even more so, the recognition from our peers really meant a lot to us. I think for me winning this award is testament to the fact that it's not necessarily about the stories we tell, but about the impact that is felt by our initiatives and our programmes that we execute, but also our collaborations, with all the different sectors - government, communities, corporations and the work that we do in partnership with business forums.

It also really meant a lot to SASOL employees because we want, as a company, to feel that our values mirror those of our employees, so just the outpouring of, I guess not even well-wishes - but pride that came from our employees, including those who are commenting on social media, was really phenomenal.

Please unpack the corporate social investment initiatives which Sasol is involved in

The Sasol Foundation is a separate entity to Sasol - their main focus is on education and then there is social impact within Sasol itself that focuses on all other aspects of social development or social investment.

Our journey started 70 years ago. And out of that journey grew Sasolburg. As the community grew around Sasol, so did our commitment to social good, which really is unequivocal. The Sasol Foundation is roughly 14 years old and they have really delivered some phenomenal achievements in terms of STEM education, working on textbooks with the Department of Education, translating them, and making sure that we bring education to life.

Sasol Techno X is probably one of the biggest science exhibitions on this continent. There is a lot to be proud of in terms of the work that we've done as the Sasol Foundation, but also from a social impact perspective, because we have such a symbiotic relationship with our communities, one of the things that we try to do is to ensure that we create share value between ourselves, government, as well as employees. And where our intent as Sasol aligns with that of our communities that is where our sweet spot is.

This includes the work that we do ensuring access to quality community health services, in terms of the clinics that we have refurbished and that we have built under the Mining SLP, and in the mobile clinics we've donated - safety is a big thing for us. We've supported local fire brigades. You can understand, fire is a big thing, especially because our operations tend to be on the peri-urban side, which means our pipelines are surrounded by grasslands. So it's important that you ensure that we keep our community safe, including access to quality, community service infrastructure. We work quite closely with the Department of Health and regarding service infrastructure we work quite closely with the district and local municipalities; this includes roads, water reticulation, bridges and access to energy. We are trying to be part of the solution, working together in collaboration to ensure our communities have access to energy - affordable energy.

We've also invested in community structures, like soccer fields and community halls - which means we try as much as possible to ensure that the quality of life around our fence-line communities is relatively high.This means working together in partnerships. We don't do everything by ourselves, and we try to engage with our communities as much as possible to ensure that the solutions that we are running are actually delivering the impact that we want. And then, of course from an environmental perspective, we do a lot around waste management. Where, again, we work in partnership with civil society, as well as organisations that are in that space, to educate our communities, around waste management to clean up and rehabilitate landfill sites and illegal dumping sites.

We support local NPOs through training development to make them more sustainable and more attractive to funders, through our capacity building programmes. So really, in essence, that's what we do and at the heart of it is about catalysing positive socio-economic change within our communities and helping to be part of the solution in terms of innovating towards a better society, which is our purpose at Sasol. So we really try to live those words on a day-to-day basis, through our products but also through the work we do in our communities.

Lastly, we use the power of our extremely large workforce to advocate within our communities as an extension of the company. So if you think about the saying ‘each one helps one’, really that's our Sasol For Good programme. We want our staff to be champions for good in our community and within our leave policy we include 40 hours of community service. So any one of our employees can decide to take a week off and go and volunteer wherever it is they want to volunteer - this is just one of the many ways Sasol is catalysing positive socio-economic change.