I truely believe with your devotion and determination to be willing to want to uplift children and enable them to reach beyond the sky that your endeavor will result in a success.

Thank you! On behalve of myself and many other parents who constantly need the aid to help us enable our children. You are teaching our children a way of life and thus changing their mentallity to that of success.

Once again. Thank you from all the parents of the scholars at Cloetesville Senior High.

I working for a great company which spend millions annually on achieving there CSI targets, which I might add they do with passion and pride.

What I do pick up from your company is that you are passionately and proudly making a difference in young peoples lives, thank you for your commitment.

If we can only have more businesses involve in uplifting our communities, the ripple effect to achieving social and economic stability would be overwhelming.

In my mind, BEE should be a partnership between businesses and private enterprise to, over time, change the demographics of the work-force and, in so doing, create better lives for all South Africans.

Now, What has happened since 1994 is that businesses of all sizes have come to the table in a significant way and, even though you will always find people that will take advantage of the system, the overall intentions are good. If we now look at the contribution of Government, however, to uphold their part of the agreement, we (as Space Age) can clearly see that there are serious delivery problems, especially from an educational point of view. Since we have been intimitely involved with learnerships as well as programs for school kids such as our SATlings endeavour, we are in the very sad position to observe an overall decline in the level of education offered to our kids. In fact, we recently heard of grade 8s in our community going to high-school without being able to read!!

I now ask you, if primary and secondary education across the country is not of a sufficiently high standard, how much can we really expect from businesses to turn these “unqualified” people into “star performers”?

Is this not the time where government has to signficantly invest in our future by making sure that all kids of tomorrow have the best opportunities?

You say it is “difficult to source previously disadvantaged employees”. I agree. You then ask if you should be “forced to employ previously disadvantaged employees that have sub-standard qualifications”. My response is “Yes!”.

If we all continue asking for and hiring candidates with 5 to 10 yrs experience then our industry’s demographic profile will remain exactly the way it is now. Sure, there are companies out there that don’t think this is a problem but they will probably opt out of the whole BEE process. If you are doing a BEE verification you are trying to prove to the world that you are contributing to the normalising of our society from an economic perspective. Companies that have a genuine interest in this will realise that _they_ need to make the change, and not wait for government or other companies to do so first. They also realise that there will be some short-term cost to them but the long-term benefit to society outweighs that cost.

I’m not advocating that you fill your organisation with incompetents. I think companies should look for EE candidates with potential and then help them realise that potential. There are gems out there who just haven’t been given the opportunities to shine. Your task as an enlightened company is to find them and grow them so that they can reach their full potential.