Royal HaskoningDHV recently announced that it has attained Level 1 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) accreditation making the firm the first engineering consultancy to achieve this in South Africa.

Commenting on the achievement Salani Sithole, Managing Director, Royal HaskoningDHV says the firm’s journey to transformation started over to transforming our organisation to meet years ago. “This journey and our focus on developing a diverse organisation matching our country’s demographics has ultimately led to the attainment of Level 1 B-BBEE,” he explains.

To attain the rating Royal HaskoningDHV’s focus was not solely on compliance as their targets were already in line with government requirements.

Sithole notes that when the Construction Charter was repealed early in 2015 the company then followed the Generic Scorecard which has much stiffer targets. The Generic Scorecard includes seven B-BBEE elements.

Royal HaskoningDHV placed particular focus on four of these elements namely, Management Control; Enterprise Development; Skills Development and Corporate Social Investment and appointed internal ‘owners’ within the company responsible for each of these areas in order to maintain focus and drive activity.

Ensuring representation at all levels

Some of the firm’s activities include:

• Developing and upskilling emerging consulting enterprises and SMMEs for many years through Enterprise Development initiatives on a number of infrastructure development projects countrywide.
• Internal skills development that involves upskilling staff through Masters and PhD programmes accredited CPD training courses and external skills development through Bursary Programmes.
• Corporate social investment initiatives such as the Saturday School’s programme.

Sithole states, “We believe it is important for the company’s management to reflect the demographics of our country, not just for our B-BBEE scorecard but in order to transform management by ensuring representation of all race groups at all levels”.

“The vision of the country is already embedded in our processes,” he concludes.