Lasting impacts
By Lindsay
While in Johannesburg we also got to do some tourist activities and while I have wanted to go on a safari for my entire life, and it was amazing to see an elephant family, giraffes and zebras. It was going to be the Apartheid Museum, Nelson Mandela’s House and the Hector Pieterson Museum that will have lasting impacts on me.
Living in the United States it is easy to take electricity for granted. We expect that when you flick the switch on, the lights will come on, unless maybe there is a big storm and the power lines are down. This is not the reality currently in South Africa, yesterday I lost my power 3 times for two hours at a time, which maybe doesn’t seem like a lot except it has been happening every day for the past 5 days. A little background on South Africa’s electricity problem: Eskom is South Africa’s public electricity company. In 2007 South Africa started to experience widespread rolling blackouts, also known as “load shedding” as supply fell behind demand. Scheduled load shedding is controlled by way of sharing the available electricity among all its customers. By switching off parts of the network in a planned and controlled manner, the system remains stable throughout the day, and the impact is spread over a wider base of customers. Since February of this year a new round of load shedding began due to the failure of coal burning boilers at some power stations due to poor quality coal. This resulted in long running periods of level 4 load shedding across the country as we are here.
With load shedding on the top of my mind recently I am reminded of our visit to Eaton Electric where they made the point that while there needs to be improvement in healthcare, education and other areas, it is hard to address those areas without power. They have had some success with a microgrid installation in Wadeville, South Africa that has significantly reduced operating costs and improved the reliability of power at a manufacturing plant. After the installation of the microgrid, the Wadeville plant experienced overall energy cost savings of 40% on average, including a 65% reduction in peak charges. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) was also reduced by nearly 10%. The microgrid system also allows continuous operation of manufacturing, regardless of the utility supply, eliminating losses in productivity due to power quality.
The other company visits were also enlightening. Our first visit was to Secha Capital, a company doing impact investing. Some of their operating companies include: Native Child, a plant-based natural hair and body care company; Stoffelberg Biltong and Geestep, an affordable, fashionable shoe company. What I found most interesting about Secha is that the only metric they use to determine impact is job creation, not even job creation among minorities, just job creation. Secha mentioned that this was the only metric they kept track of because it was the only metric the country incentivized them to keep track of. At this point they lack the human capital to keep track of other metrics. Due to the size of the company they are unable to grow outside of South Africa because part of their model is to insert their people into the company, which I think is an interesting business strategy and a reason for their success. While they may be social impact light I think the work they are doing is very interesting and I hope they can expand to the point where they can focus on tracking more sustainability metrics and expand their model into other African countries.
Room to Read was our next visit. Room to Read is a worldwide program that started in Nepal in 1998 when then-Microsoft Executive John Wood saw that schools there didn’t have books for students. Room to Read began working in South Africa in 2006. South Africa’s program works in teacher training in literacy, the creation of school libraries, and provides reading materials across South Africa’s 11 official languages. To date in South Africa Room to Read has reached 469 schools, 1,021 teachers and 362,180 students. What is cool about Room to Read is they make their own books, they come up with stories that they know the children will be interested in and are relevant to the kinds of South Africa, not just generic books that South African youth can’t relate to. As someone that never loved to read as a kid, seeing a group so invested in getting kids interested in reading from a young age was great to see, because a love of reading carries over into adulthood.
Mandate Molefi calls itself human resource consultants ,but in listening to CEO Nene Molefi talk, she talks about and preaches much more than that. She talked of diversity, equity and inclusion, unconscious biases, building effective teams and leadership development. My biggest take away was regarding unconscious bias and how we all have them. Take for example if you are interviewing someone and they might look like you have a similar background to you and you can see a younger version of yourself in them, if they struggle in an interview you may help them, give them a moment to collect themselves and then continue, then the next candidate come in and they two are struggling but they are male, from a different background and you have nothing in common, so you don’t think to offer him that moment to collect himself. You didn’t mean to favor one candidate over another it was an unconscious decision but one that definitely favored on candidate over another. So what can we do to not have these biases? Something as simple as talking about them up front so that everyone is looking out for them, and can help you avoid them.
Our last day was health day where we learned about the Tuberculosis outbreak at the World Health Organization and the AIDS epidemic at WITS RHI. While health has never been a major are of interest to me I though what WITS RHI was doing in bringing home tests to South Africa was really amazing. We were told about how in order to reach the UNAIDS target of 90–90–90—whereby, by 2020, 90% of people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of people who know their HIV-positive status will be accessing treatment and 90% of people on treatment will have suppressed viral loads. Members of WITS went to taxi stands to try to get tests in the hands of people that may not otherwise get tested. They also offer, but do not mandate counseling, which is smart because some may not want counseling right after finding their status and others may come back for counseling, but in making it optional it makes it not so scary for people that might be scared away by mandatory counseling. In doing the outreach WITS believes they are at their first 90, where 90% know their HIV status. In polling our class, our class alone would not have met that 90% as knowing your status means having been tested within the last year.
While in Johannesburg we also got to do some tourist activities and while I have wanted to go on a safari for my entire life, and it was amazing to see an elephant family, giraffes and zebras. It was going to be the Apartheid Museum, Nelson Mandela’s House and the Hector Pieterson Museum that will have lasting impacts on me. To be honest I did not know much about Apartheid going into this trip, other than the basics, that it was South Africa’s system of segregation based on race, which I thought was probably similar to our own. I had never heard of Hector Pieterson – for those who don’t know who he was, he was a South African schoolboy who was shot and killed during the Soweto uprising, when police opened fire on students protesting the enforcement of teaching in Afrikaans. The part of the Apartheid museum that got to me most was watching the video of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. It is hard to describe the feelings you have in hearing about the horrible things people did to others because they had a different skin color, while looking completely remorseless, but it is a feeling that will last with me and while it was hard to see and hear, I am very glad to have had the experience.