Doing Good

We have always maintained that “insurance is, at its core, an instrument for social good, a fundamental enabler of progress. By ensuring that potentially catastrophic or devastating setbacks are mitigated, we enable people to take the risks that must be taken if we are to progress as a society.”  

So, by doing what we do every day, we enable more people to create and secure a better future. 

Insurance for low-income consumers

Because formal insurance has traditionally not been accessible to low-income consumers, we have developed several initiatives to deliver value for money products to these markets, thereby enabling more people to enjoy the very real benefits that appropriate insurance products can deliver. We already insure more than 2,5 million consumers in this segment, but our work is far from done. We have set ourselves bold growth targets, and are in the process of extending our range of solutions to include affordable short-term insurance products and savings and credit solutions for these consumers, to meet their needs appropriately.

But we also do good through the way we go about our business.

Enterprise and supplier development

We have a unique supplier development programme that supports black entrepreneurs, including several former Hollardites who have started their businesses within the greater Hollard ecosystem. The programme provides these entrepreneurs with a medium-term supplier contract and supports them with management advice and finance, as well as exposure to Hollard’s networks. 

Streetwise Finance

Our very own Hollardite CSI volunteers developed a financial literacy programme called StreetWise Finance (SWF), which teaches ordinary consumers the basics of budgeting, saving and borrowing, insurance and retirement planning, using gamification methodology. The SWF Programme was recently expanded to include an e-learning version. This has significantly increased the number of consumers who can be reached. Click here to learn more about StreetWise Finance. 

Then there are also initiatives such as Kago Ya Bana and the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (“Harambee”), which are large-scale systemic change programmes to catalyse positive and sustainable change at a systemic level, and in which we have played a catalytic role.

Kago Ya Bana

Through Kago Ya Bana (KYB), Sotho for “building together for children”, the Hollard Trust’s flagship Early Childhood Development (ECD) programme, funded by Hollard, more and more vulnerable children in their foundation years are being provided with care, adequate nutrition, early learning, and access to quality ECD that enables them to be healthy and ready for formal schooling so that they may ultimately reach their full potential in life.

The programme was launched in 2007 as a partnership between the Hollard Trust, the Midvaal Municipality, the Gauteng Department of Social Development, and later, the Department of Education in the Midvaal Local Municipality. It’s a municipal change model, catalysing and driving a system-wide process to enhance and build municipalities’ capacity and processes for delivering quality ECD. Because of its success, the programme is currently being rolled out in the City of Johannesburg and Lesedi municipalities, to ultimately reach more than 50% of children nationally. Click here to learn more about how KYB is making a difference.

The ECD delivery gap presents an Enterprise Development (ED) opportunity for women-owned micro-enterprises to achieve municipal compliance and so have access to multiple income streams – and for corporates to earn ED points. And so the KYB ECD Enterprise Incubator was born to enhance the KYB model. It comprises a three-pronged package: private infrastructure investment to make the ECD space safe for children and so help the micro-enterprise achieve compliance; seed funding to kick-start new ECD enterprises; and capacitation of ECD businesses, though training in delivering quality early learning.

KYB has also spawned the exciting SmartStart early learning social franchise, which has the visionary goal of providing quality early learning to one million vulnerable 3- and 4-year olds in their pre-school readiness phase annually by 2026. Having kicked off in 2015, there are already over 17 000 children in the system, with 1 000 KYB ECD practitioners having been trained in SmartStart’s early-learning stimulation methodology. To learn more about SmartStart click here.

Harambee

Harambee (Swahili for “all pull together”) was developed in response to research conducted by the Development Bank of South Africa which showed that if a young South African kept a job for at least 12 months, they had an 85% chance of being employed for the rest of their lives. We co-founded this youth employment accelerator in 2011 to catalyse the connecting of unemployed matriculants from disadvantaged backgrounds with sustainable employment opportunities. 

We continue to employ Harambees and to recruit corporate members to Harambee’s ever-expanding network of employer partners. Since it started in 2011, Harambee has enabled almost 40 000 young people to secure a better future through full-time, sustainable employment, and has supported more than 350 000 young work seekers in improving their employability. Harambee now has partnerships with local government and with 358 employers in more than ten sectors of the economy. Click here to learn more about Harambee.