Mining Indaba Urges Stronger Collaboration To Unlock Sustainable Community Development

Image credit: Anglo American

Not only are each of these an important area of exploration, but they are interconnected.

Driving inclusive economic growth

Collaboration is fundamental to achieving inclusive local growth.

Inclusive local economic development is necessary for the sustainability of mining communities and the wider economy.

Conditions in many mining communities make it clear that efforts to develop local economies and create positive social impact are falling short: unemployment remains a dominant community pressure point, and energy and water insecurity, infrastructure backlogs and weak spatial planning are ongoing constraints.

Jobs are not being created at the levels needed to grow local economies that are meaningfully independent from the mining value chain.

The indaba recognised that transformative approaches are needed to achieve change.

Community participation and provincial investment promotion, together with an enhanced understanding of domestic beneficiation, all form part of ensuring that mining drives domestic economic development.

However, none of this can be accomplished in isolation.

Reliance on discrete funding levers such as social and labour plan (SLP) commitments, corporate social investment (CSI), and other socio-economic development (SED) funds creates a fragmented and short-term approach to solving complex, long-term problems.

Fragmentation is not effective: collaboration between business, government, civil society and communities is the only way to create change.

Collaboration has become a buzzword in social investment, but we need to move beyond talking about it and work together to coordinate resources.

In our experience, we have found a strong appetite among social investors to move from compliance-driven, siloed interventions toward a deliberate, collaborative approach.

We are already seeing examples of collaborative efforts with specific emphasis on investing in inclusive local growth.

The need for collaboration

The indaba highlighted the Impact Finance Network (IFN), through which Anglo American and its partners, Impact Capital Africa and Edge Growth, are identifying innovative, impactful businesses in the region and bringing together a network of investors seeking social investment opportunities.

Taking a regional approach, Tshikululu has begun the internal process of working in partnership to define a long-term, structured collaboration model across mining houses with operations in the same district.

These companies and their host communities share deep, systemic challenges that cannot be solved through isolated programmatic investments.

Instead, we are working together to find collaborative solutions that can work at scale.

Collaboration is not easy, but it is necessary.

Effective collaboration, especially when targeting issues on a scale as big as local economic development, relies on good governance and a clear strategy.

It requires all parties to align on shared outcomes, even while different pots of funding and diverse activities are deployed to achieve them.

Inclusive local economic development is a strategic imperative for South Africa, and especially for the mining industry.

Everyone has a role to play, and collaborating strategically to achieve shared goals is the only way to succeed.