Corporates that Care: Galvanising business to help solve SA's biggest social challenges

Corporate social investment (CSI), or the practice of companies contributing to social development, is becoming more important around the world and in South Africa to help empower vulnerable citizens.

The 'Corporates that Care' CSI initiative was launched by Primedia Broadcasting early in 2024 as an integral part of the 'Primedia Cares' programme

Broadcasting live from the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, Stephen Grootes talks to Trish Taylor, the head of 'Primedia Cares'.

Taylor describes the initiative as the social impact arm of the Primedia Group, focused on using its entire portfolio to make a strong statement around how to best accelerate social change by playing its part as media.

"It's about how do we galvanise corporates around really making a difference and helping solve the biggest social challenges in our country."

RELATED: Primedia Cares: ‘Making a difference to society is one of our core values as a business’

With many CEOs at this point extremely aware of their CSI responsibility, how do they choose the area to funnel their resources where they will have the most impact?

Taylor says the most sophisticated impact strategies they've seen is where companies align their CSI drivers to their business prerogatives.

"That's where we see a lot of success because the areas they're getting involved in are not too far from the businesses they're in. It's wonderful to see corporates taking the social challenges of our country very seriously and really putting up their hand to say, 'how do we as a company help and how do we drive this collective impact agenda' that quite frankly all of us have a responsibility to."

CSI is no longer just a feel-good add-on, Taylor says, but has become an essential part of business strategy that sits at board level.

And of course, in the big picture, it benefits businesses when our economy is stronger.

"If we want business to be sustainable and to grow, if we want employment to grow, corporates have to play a significant role in boosting our economy in all the ways that they can and, once again, helping solve the bigest social challenges facing SA."

"I think that is where the sustainability comes in, because at the end of the day businesses want to increase their market share... and increase the size of the economy because that's when purchasing power for their particular products increases. So it can have a variety of different objectives but fundamentally it's about how do we all pull together - business, media, NPOs - around our core challenges to make a difference."

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the full conversation