The announcement of the establishment of the HP Business Institute (HPBI) made at the end of August, has contributed toward HP South Africa achieving the second highest level of compliance with the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice.
This represents a greater than 85 percent (or Level 2) level of compliance in terms of these Codes of Good Practice.
The Corporate Affairs EMEA team spoke to Benni North, Transformation Manager, HP South Africa about the preparations that led to HPBI and the overall B-BBEE programme that HP considers to be part of its responsibility to “do the right thing” in the South African market, as HP does in every local market where it has a presence.
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Q: How is HP implementing the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Initiative?
BN:The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Initiative (B-BBEE), which is led by the South African Department of Trade and Industry, seeks to address the economic imbalance of South Africa’s past. Under Apartheid rule, South Africans classified as Black were excluded from full participation in the economic benefits of South Africa.
In this context, we want to do all we can to help adjust this historic bias and contribute to the transformation of the South African economy towards an inclusive, prosperous future. We have developed and implemented a comprehensive strategy to address each of the areas identified by B-BBEE. The HP Business Institute is just one part of our efforts.
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Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the HP Business Institute?
BN: HPBI is an enterprise development programme, which aims to help with the growth of existing small and medium enterprises (SME) in the IT sector. HPBI is also a skills development programme aimed at existing employees of these SME B-BBEE IT companies, and graduates in the IT sector.
The primary focus is on developing the necessary skills in high growth areas of the IT industry. These skills will be developed within existing SME B-BBEE IT companies, thus enabling these companies to break through into more sustainable and lucrative areas of the industry.
In conjunction with participating partners, individuals will be selected for participation in the following skills development initiatives:
- Graduates for one year learnerships (similar to apprenticeships), including specialist IT skills and HP Certification
- Existing employees of these partners who will be placed in short term skills programmes
These graduates and existing employees will be better equipped with appropriate IT and business skills, so they will become more productive and hopefully contribute to their company’s long-term wealth and future growth, and thus not only benefit their company, but will also be benefiting the industry and the South African economy. The programme is designed to train up to 300 students per year over the seven year programme duration.
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Q: What other areas of the B-BBEE are you working on?
BN: The B-BBEE programme has seven elements, and we have developed a comprehensive strategy to address each of these. Other than the HPBI investment, the other key areas that we are addressing are:
- Human resource development, where through a diverse range of training and recruitment activities we are transforming the racial make-up of the HP South Africa staff and management to be more in line with the demographics of our country.
- Corporate Social Investment, where our focus is primarily on the use of IT in education of previously disadvantaged folk external to HP.
- Procurement, where we ensure that a significant part of our procurement is from B-BBEE companies.
- Enterprise Development, where we work with our peers, customers and partners to help these organisations increase their level of B-BBEE compliance.
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Further information
Read more about B-BBEE
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Global Citizenship Reports 2006 (*) |
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Printable version
