SAB Foundation

SAB Foundation is empowering women, youth, people living in rural areas and people living with disabilities to become entrepreneurs who in turn create a better life for those around them.

The SAB Foundation invests in entrepreneurs and social innovators – with an emphasis on services and products that benefit women, youth, people living in rural areas and persons living with disabilities – who show the potential and commitment to grow their businesses and create jobs.

Set up in 2010 as one element of SAB’s broad-based black economic empowerment transaction, SAB Zenzele, the SAB Foundation is an independent trust that annually invests millions of rands towards developing entrepreneurship in South Africa and ensuring that low-income communities are uplifted.

The SAB Foundation holds 8.4 million SAB Ltd shares through SAB Zenzele and applies the dividend and special dividend income received from these shares for the benefit of the wider South African community.

The objective of the SAB Foundation is as follows: The provision of funding and support for small, medium and micro-sized enterprises, to contribute to the economic and social empowerment of historically disadvantaged persons, primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by means of entrepreneurship development and with a priority focus on providing opportunities within small, medium and micro-sized enterprises for women, youth, people living in rural areas, as well as persons living with disabilities.

The Rural Catalyst

In conjunction with SaveAct, we create rural logistics channels for social innovation products through entrepreneurship and set up small farming businesses in hard to reach rural areas. The intention of the channel was to create self-employment for people by becoming sales agents of a catalogue of products – some of which are previous SAB Foundation social innovation award winners.

A pilot conducted in 2016 saw 15 people trained and operating as sales agents in rural areas surrounding Matatiele in the Eastern Cape. The pilot was deemed a success, so 2017 will see us scale up this work to other areas where savings groups exist.

It is our intention that these two interventions will assist in creating pipeline for the Tholoana Enterprise Programme and the Social Innovation Awards.

Source: www.sabentrepreneurship.co.za