Community engagement

While our goal is to make a difference in the communities where we work by sharing our time and knowledge, PwC people also benefit from new skills, enhanced personal fulfilment and deeper local relationships.

Our approach to volunteering and community engagement considers our local priorities and customs so that the activities have a positive impact on our beneficiaries. To learn more about our commitment to community engagement please see our CR commitments page.

We're supporting entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs create socio-economic value for their communities. We seek to strengthen the business skills and expertise of these entrepreneurs. Such capacity-building is one of the most useful ways that we can support small business as it ensures that the work undertaken adds strategic value to organisations and maximises PwC’s impact.

Annually, PwC builds the skills of local entrepreneurs throughout the country through the Business Skills of South Africa (BSSA) foundation by providing business and entrepreneurial skills to previously disadvantaged communities in order to create jobs, promote sustainability and increase wealth. In addition, PwC also seeks to support under privileged women from rural areas by facilitating workshops to provide them with the knowledge to start-up and manage their own businesses through the Faranani Rural Women Training Initiative.

We also contribute to national policies of procurement and enterprise development by organising co-operative ventures with black business organisations, and we procure services from black-owned and black-managed suppliers.

We're supporting education programmes

PwC is committed to investing in initiatives that support the improvement of schools in rural communities in order to increase access to quality education.

PwC firms across the country work with schools in their local communities by investing their time and resources into various projects ranging from basic infrastructure upgrades to learner welfare initiatives.

Through our partnership with CIDA City Campus, PwC offers talented students from disadvantaged communities a chance to prepare for a career in the accounting field by offering our time to lecture and tutor students as well as deliver presentations about the accounting and auditing profession.

Our bursary programme has enabled us to support the educational pursuits of thousands of students around the country who are particularly enthusiastic about pursuing careers as chartered accountants. Through our programme we have awarded bursaries amounting to over R34 million to students predominantly from disadvantaged communities.

Through our engagement as a consortium partner of the Performance Management Development Programme (PMDP)- a programme aimed at improving the functionality of schools, we have also been instrumental in the programmes success, which to date includes roll out of the programme across 25% of all schools in KwaZulu-Natal and recent expansion to the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces.

We're raising reporting standards in the not-for-profit sector. Over the years, PwC has offered critical knowledge and expertise to a wide variety of nonprofit organisations on a pro bono basis to assist non-profits report their results effectively and accurately. Delivering pro bono services is an important part of how we help our communities thrive. By sharing the skills of our people, we help enable non-profits to achieve their missions and serve our communities. We provide our skills through formal fee-waived engagements and the time our partners and staff commit to board positions at non-profit organisations.