August is celebrated as Women’s Month in South Africa, a poignant reminder of the 1956 heroines that helped build the foundations of democracy in our country. This year, the theme was “Women’s Socio-Economic Rights and Empowerment: Building Back Better for Women’s Improved Resilience”.
Sadly, on Women’s Day, South Africans were forced to confront the nation’s primary pandemic—rising violence against women and children. The need to address the killing of women is urgent. Action is required to deal with issues such as gender oppression, marginalisation, patriarchy and sexism both at home and in the workplace.
Compared to other sectors and industries in South Africa and around the world, the technology and mining industries employ the fewest female workers. Despite making up only 12% of the mining workforce in South Africa, women account for around 50.8%, over half of the country’s population.
There is still work to be done to achieve gender equality in these industries, despite efforts to expand the participation of women in the economy. Women must be embraced and given access to leadership opportunities across all industries. An increasing body of research indicates that women involvement in leadership positions can lead to better financial performance, better governance and improved overall business performance.
We recognise that business executives now have a greater responsibility to consider the impact their business has on internal and external stakeholders. With increased pressure to enable socio economic inclusion of vulnerable people and communities into their workforce and supply chain, it has become imperative for leaders to access baseline information, outlining fault lines and trends in their workforce, skills development initiatives and procurement practices.
Insite streamlines the onboarding, analysis and reporting of social performance data against pre-defined impact and compliance metrics. Insite enables clients to make strategic decisions with respect to their workforce, skills development initiatives and procurement processes in order to promote localization, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace and supply chain. Clients that have utilised Insite have shown that:
- By connecting to numerous data sources, Insite enables miners to publish accurate Social Performance Data earlier.
- As a result of the software’s ability to generate social compliance reports like Mining Charters, SLP, and B-BBEE score cards, on a monthly basis, our clients avoid risk and mistakes in planning and reporting.
- Enables clients to streamline management reports and social performance data.
- Use refined processes and robust security to manage recurring, multi-author reports.
- Insite provides a deeper understanding of the demographics of your workforce and the skills needed to direct career and skills development programs for both employees and unemployed people in surrounding communities.
Ms. Nkumbi Dakile, a stakeholder engagement specialist for Petra Diamonds Ltd., has been using Insite since 2018 and says it has significantly streamlined and improved her work. She encourages other mining organizations to utilize Insite since, in her opinion; there isn’t another system in the mining industry that is as accurate and transparent.
Violet Dube, ABET Supervisor at Sedibelo Resources says the system is very useful and user friendly especially for populating reports. Insite makes life easier in a way that information is easily accessible and easy to manage.
