Corporate and Social Responsibility
We are passionate about making a difference in South Africa. As a company we contribute to various charities, and all staff are encouraged to get involved in our initiatives. TNS has a partnership with UNICEF, which for 60 years has been the world’s leading children charity.
Corporate social investment
We believe that a combination of financial contributions and staff involvement is essential to making a meaningful contribution. We encourage our staff, at all levels, to contribute their time and skills wherever possible. Where possible, we also appeal to our clients and suppliers to “come on board” and get involved – and/or we try and support their social investment activities as far as possible (for example, helping one of our clients to raise awareness of CHOC House Foundation by handing out pamphlets at traffic lights).
Promoting project sustainability and self-sufficiency, as opposed to dependency, is very important to us. And as with everything that we do, we know that establishing and maintaining partnerships is key to maximizing the impact of any contribution.
In order to make our efforts more impactful, we are currently in the process of formalizing our CSI strategy to take us and our partners through to 2010.
Africa Food for Thought (AFFT)
We believe it is important to focus our CSI involvement in order to maximize its impact of making a difference. Developing and supporting SA’s children and youth is a recurring theme across the initiatives we choose to partner with. This segment of population is believed to be not only our most vulnerable one but also most key in ensuring a better future for all.
Africa Food for Thought (AFFT) forms the majority of our CSI program.
AFFT is a non-profit voluntary association involved in food distribution, feeding programmes and poverty relief. Most of the project’s feeding programmes are aimed at schools, particularly primary schools in a number of Gauteng’s informal settlements. RS has been a consistent contributor of approximately a half of the direct Rand amount that this project operates on.
We equip and supply school feeding projects, to improve nutrition, in order to enhance learning and concentration amongst those the school identifies as the most disadvantaged.
Currently we have nine school projects and five pre-school projects that feed
7 354 learners and 235 other children – 7 600 in all.
17 260 meals are served every week at schools and 965 elsewhere – 18 225 in all.
32 food-parcels for child, granny-headed and other vulnerable households (identified through our schools) are prepared each week.
Staff involvement
Quiz evening fund-raising events
Regular Easter Egg or the Christmas’ sweets AFFT collection drive are undertaken, where hundreds of goodies are collected by our staff
Assisting with preparing and organizing birthday and Christmas parties for the AFFT children
Other initiatives include:
Appealing for staff donations for a specific cause and matching the collected amount by a company donation
Visiting uMephi Children’s Home to interact with the babies and staff
Running half-day job-shadowing projects with different project teams at our offices, where a number of underprivileged Grade 10 learners spend time learning about what we do and how we do it
Partnering with UNICEF
TNS' and UNICEF's partnership began in 2005, when the group made a donation to UNICEF in response to the tsunami disaster. We then embarked on a ‘Imagine…’ program, our three-year project in Cambodia which has raised enough funds to build 120 new community pre-school shelters, which could expand access to education to 14,400 children aged between three and five years. In addition, Imagine… funding has trained 899 community pre-school teachers and provided educational supplies.
Initiatives such as this are vital to the future development of a country where less than half of the children enrolled in schools complete their primary education and 14 per cent drop out in the first year.
Employee development
Internationally the group’s commitment to community involvement is recognised through the External Development module of the Tony Cowling Academy of Excellence (our international iInternal Training Program). Employees are encouraged to participate in group or individual community secondments, with the aim of combining the benefits to their personal development with the opportunity to serve their local communities.
Locally TNS Research Surveys invests extensively in the TNS Academy which is a dedicated employee training program. Employees may also attend external training or conferences and seminars aimed at furthering their professional development.
TNS Research Surveys offers employees an opportunity each year to apply for internal bursaries for study courses in line with the company’s core business.