Limpopo Business 2020/21 edition

Focussed support
for communities
INTERVIEW
Venetia Mine General Manager Gerrie Nortje explains how a Community Response
Plan is coordinating efforts in water provision, food security, health and safety in
labour-sending areas.
Venetia Mine General
Manager, Gerrie Nortje
BIOGRAPHY
Gerrie Nortje began his career
with Anglo American in 1997
as a bursar studying Mining
Engineering. On completion of
his degree, he worked at various
Anglo American Thermal Coal
operations before becoming
Operations Manager at Xstrata.
He rejoined Anglo American as
Principal Mining Engineer and
transitioned into a Lead Open
Pit Mining role in 2014 as a
member of the Technical and
Sustainability team. At head
office he was involved with a
variety of projects across the
group’s business units.
What is the Community Response Plan?
As a responsible corporate citizen and a long-term committed
partner in the communities where we operate, we, as Venetia Mine,
are actively and urgently supporting the efforts of the communities
in our labour-sending areas during the Covid 19 pandemic.
The Community Response Plan (CRP) helps us focus our efforts
in addressing the most urgent needs first, while ensuring that where
possible, projects benefit the communities over the longer term.
Some of the support we have provided includes:
• Provision of food: donation of food parcels to indigent households,
hospitals, homeless shelters and GBV centres.
• Water: the provision of water tanks, repair and maintenance of water
infrastructure and the upgrading of infrastructure to sustain the
supply of water to communities.
• Hospital and clinic support: providing much-needed personal
protective equipment (PPE) to hospitals and clinics, and providing
hospitals with medical equipment including two ventilators.
• Gender Based Violence: providing victim empowerment centres
with hygiene packs for victims, communication material and posters
and upgrading some of the facilities
• SMEs: remote support to small businesses in dealing with the impact
of the lockdown on their businesses and supporting them to apply
for government-funded support programmes.
• Testing facilities: making sure that our facilities are all available.
The CRP is a living plan that changes as we navigate through the
pandemic. Some of our contracting partners (Total and Sandvik) have
agreed to support a small farmer rural development programme
aimed at capacitating 500 small farmers in our host communities.
What has been the impact on the number of people who work
at the mine at any one time?
We started developing and implementing measures to protect our
employees and contractors since the pandemic became a public
concern and we continue to enhance and improve these controls.
Key to these measures is the education of our workforce on how the
virus spreads and equipping them with the right information to continuously
do the right things to protect themselves and others. A number
of things had to be considered as we started to ramp up production:
45 LIMPOPO BUSINESS 2020/21