Community
The local community is an integral part of the TERRAGRN vision
Mpumalanga, eNkangala District, where our first site is situated, is in the coal-mining heartland of South Africa with a lot of vegetation, savannah grasslands, and forest cover several decades ago. Today, much of the land is barren, with very little tree cover. There is widespread sentiment in the region that air is polluted and the water from the Olifants River is contaminated, due to mining activities, making living conditions challenging for the local people.
Mpumalanga has 12 of South Africa’s 14 coal mines and there is a need to support SAs “Just Transition” and the regeneration of local land and water quality And, there is an urgent need to turn the vast degraded lands for productive use and create a “green sustainable economy” championed through a large Nature-based Solutions (NbS) such as TERRAGRN.
In the region, the population growth rate is expected to exceed economic growth until 2030, putting pressure on the infrastructure, services, and driving increased unemployment. Unemployment is even higher among women and according to the Emalahleni Municipality Annual Report 2020-21 an average of only 2,511 new employment opportunities per annum were created in the prior 4-year period, 2015-2019. i.e.: approx. 10,000 jobs over 4 years.
The Thembisile Hani Local Municipality in Mpumalanga has an estimated population of almost 400k people based on the 2021 community survey conducted by Statistic South Africa and just over 100k households as of 2015. Unemployment in Mpumalanga was at 51.6% as of Q1 2022 and poverty rate at 52.7%. Of the total population 52.4% are female and over 2/3 of the population are below 35 years resulting in favourable demographics of a younger and skilled workforce in the next 2 - 3 decades.
We plan to reskill and employ several thousand local people in our Agroforestry enterprise resulting in a long term economically viable social system. Interested people from the local community joining the TERRAGRN workforce will have opportunities to develop skills and be employed in either the upstream agroforest business or in the downstream processing businesses (energy, materials, power, food).
TERRAGRN will be offering a number of opportunities for local women to join the workforce and also provide services and upskilling for entrepreneurs, increasing gender equality and a gender-balanced participation. We anticipate that several thousand women will be able to participate in different ways and TERRAGRN will create a more inclusive local economy.
The local community is an integral part of the TERRAGRN vision and it's important to be providing jobs for families living on the land who previously either didn't have jobs or who were traveling long distances to work. Many of our employees on the farm are from families who live within walking distance.
Through TERRAGRN’s agroforestry system more than 2,500 jobs will be created in the next 5 years and the company will be one of the largest employers in the local region.
We are also working hard to engage with the local community and support them in as many ways as possible, this includes hiring and also sourcing as many of the resources as possible locally. This covers equipment and machinery, necromass and manure for the soil regeneration, and more and we are building a database of all our local suppliers so we can call on them as and when required. Naturally, not everything can be sourced hyper locally, but we're focused on making sure that as much of what we need as possible comes from the immediate vicinity of the farm so that the money we spend is invested back into the community we live and work in.
If you are interested in getting involved with TERRAGRN please send us your details and tell us where you are based and your reason for interest/question, Click here
