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IDEMIA South Africa achieves level 1 B-BBEE status

Paul Jeremias.

This recognised status reflects the continued efforts of the company in creating opportunities for black South Africans in its employment, supply chain and contribution to the community.

“Simply put, we consider it the right thing to do,” says Paul Jeremias, IDEMIA’s director of public security and identity and country manager, South Africa. “We achieved B-BBEE Level 2 last year and our improvement this year demonstrates that the action plan we put together has set us on the right track to support our community even better.”

As part of the action plan to improve its status to Level 1, IDEMIA now works with over 40 black-owned local suppliers. This represents over 30% of IDEMIA’s local suppliers. Within the number of black-owned suppliers, more than half are owned/run by black women. In addition, 39% of the company’s employees are black women.

Empowerment is more than statistics. To truly create more opportunities for previously disadvantaged individuals, training and education are crucial. To this end, IDEMIA offers several training programmes for its employees, including finance for non-financial managers and intermediate and advanced level courses in the Microsoft Office suite. Other training includes courses in soft skills such as conflict management and public speaking. In 2020, IDEMIA trained over 80% of its employees on skills that have value-added to their daily course of work.

As part of the IDEMIA’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, IMPACT, the company is exploring initiatives with local education institutions to raise awareness of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields and create opportunities for students in STEM education. IDEMIA IMPACT aims to redefine sustainable business through 17 priorities, including a commitment to work on a global community programme focused on education, young people and technology, under five key pillars (communities, environment, people, customers/partners/suppliers, ethics) by 2023.

“As a technology company, expanding STEM education to even more children is an essential pillar of IDEMIA’s IMPACT programme,” says Jeremias. “We have been an active supporter of initiatives such as the MTN Business App of the Year, which are geared to uncovering and developing local talent. Now with the opportunity to work directly with local schools, we will be able to have a direct positive impact on enabling the expansion of the South African technical talent pool.”

Located in Johannesburg, IDEMIA operates a state-of-the-art personalisation centre and has grown to over 200 people in the country.

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