The Empowerment Endowment

How have South Africa’s businesses engaged with BEE legislation? This has often been a contentious issue and the goalposts have kept moving. However, one of the exciting key outcomes has been the establishment of 27 new grant-making foundations in South Africa, mostly in the last two years, that have been endowed with a surprisingly massive amount of R32.6-billion in assets that will support charitable causes in perpetuity. This information emerged from a ground-breaking report entitled “The Empowerment Endowment” released by Intellidex, a financial research company, which gathered data from 35 companies and explored what value has been created specifically for charitable recipients through BEE deals, “including community trusts, existing charities and newly established foundations”.