The AfroCentric Group is the most diversified healthcare company in Southern Africa, with more than four million lives covered in the region. The Group is the most transformed entity listed in the healthcare sector of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), with a focus on health administration, health risk management, pharmaceuticals, wellness and disease management as well as health-centric information and communications technology-based solutions.
Entities within the AfroCentric Group include AfroCentric Technologies, AfroCentric Distribution Services, AfroCentric, Wellness, AfroCentric Primary Care, PharmacyDirect and its largest entity, Medscheme.
AfroCentric Group is proud of its solid focus on youth. Our Socio-Economic Policy has a clear bias to the youth which continued to be reflected in our main investments for the youth sector in the past financial year:
- Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Hospital School was able to continue supporting learners who are hospitalised for long periods of time due to chronic or long-term illnesses, because of our investments.
- While the main project for Vision for Change is their Vision is Vital project which provides eye testing and supply spectacles to thousands of school children, AfroCentric supported their school beneficiaries with Covid-19 information packs and food parcels to help alleviate the financial pressures on their families, imposed by the pandemic.
- The four medical students the Group is funding through the ACT bursary scheme are currently in their fifth year of studies at the University of Pretoria and Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University.
- AfroCentric also sponsored the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa (CMSA) with an educationist to strengthen the quality of biannual examinations for medical doctors and dentists undergoing postgraduate training.
Through partnerships with various organisations in the country dating back to 2012, the company has enabled South Africa to have 76 qualified doctors as well as 100 PhD and master’s students enrolled to specialise in medical research. This is a significant contribution given the heightened need to enable equitable and affordable access to healthcare to millions of South Africans, who cannot afford medical aid.
We are equally pleased that most of our staff is young and we have several internship and recruitment programmes that have provided work opportunities for young people, some of whom were not employed before.
Over the last three years a total of 178 unemployed learners were enrolled for qualifications through learnership opportunities; on completion 83 were permanently employed and an additional 52 learners were offered temporary contracts after their learnership completed.
We are also proud of the departments and individual staff members who are volunteers, thereby making a difference to members of their communities and broader society. We encourage you to continue living up to this ideal of uplifting others, when you do — please do so safely and responsibly.
In addition a total of 53 differently abled employees were hired in the last three years, 19 out of 53 new hires were under the age of 30. Twenty-one were under the age of 40 and 13 were over the age of 40.
The responsibility towards the future of this country lies in the hands of the youth. But, it is also the responsibility of the rest of us to aid and assist the development and education of the younger generation.
The young people of today continue to bear the brunt of our stagnant economic growth, which has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate in South Africa is at a staggering 15-year high of 32.6% and the official unemployment rate among youth (15-34 years) in quarter 1, 2021 was 46.3%. If we all give a little back, or pay it forward, the world gets better tomorrow than it was yesterday.
AfroCentric
Healthier Together
www.afrocentric.za.com