Sharing brightness

Good business. Better world.

The Impilo Yesizwe (Health of the Nation) trust was established by RMB in October 2010 to participate in the MTN Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) transaction. Along with the Imfundo Yesizwe (Education of the Nation) and Intuthuko Yesizwe (Development of the Nation) trusts, it entered into partnership agreements with RMB, which, funded the trusts on an arm’s-length basis to participate in the transaction. In November 2016, the MTN BEE transaction was unwound, with each trust receiving around ZAR5.2-m in net profit from the partnerships.

Surgeons for Little Lives

Surgeons for Little Lives (SFLL), a non-profit organisation run by a small group of paediatric surgeons committed to uplifting the lives of children requiring life-changing surgery, was selected as the beneficiary of the Impilo Yesizwe trust. SFLL was established with the over-riding objective of raising the level of care given to patients in the paediatric surgery wards of hospitals in the greater Gauteng area, to world-class standards. In this way, SFLL aligns with the RMB principles of good people doing great things, such as giving of rare and specialist skills to those who need it most. SFLL’s chairman is Professor Jerome Loveland, head of Paediatric Surgery at CHBAH, and The University of the Witwatersrand.

It is a basic human right of mothers to express their breast milk in a clean, professional environment with dignity, supported by trained lactation experts. This is currently not the case at CHBAH, where mothers currently have no option but to express their breast milk in corridors and other public spaces without the help or support of trained medical professionals. Equally important is to provide newborns admitted to CHBAH with maternally expressed or donated breast milk (as opposed to formula). The direct outcome of this breast-milk feeding will be the reduction of the currently devastating burden of necrotiszing enterocolitis (NEC) in babies, where the intestinal tissue becomes damaged and begins to die. The provision of maternal or donated breast milk feeds is known to significantly reduce the incidence of NEC, and, in many units where this feeding regime has been implemented, has contributed to practically eradicating the disease. The subsequent impact on hospital neonatal mortality is profound.

RMB’s donation to SFLL was allocated towards building a lactation and breast-milk facility at CHBAH, which will include breast-milk expressing rooms, a milk processing plant, a breast-milk bank, a transport network and an antenatal and postnatal education facility.

Donations to SFLL and the beneficiaries of the Imfundo Yesizwe and Intuthuko Yesizwe trusts fall outside of RMB’s corporate social investment spend as a percentage of after-tax profits; thus and, instead, RMB applied its intellectual capital, balance sheet and structuring expertise to participate in a transaction for the ultimate benefit of others. A sincere, demonstration of RMB’s Solutionist Thinking at work, and proof that with passion and persistence, good business can create a better world.

For more information on SFLL, or to get in touch directly, visit: www.surgeonsforlittlelives.org