Empact Group is placing employee development, economic inclusion and operational sustainability at the centre of its ESG strategy as South African businesses confront high unemployment, energy constraints and growing pressure to demonstrate measurable sustainability outcomes. In its first sustainability report, the food services and support solutions company sets out initiatives spanning workforce development, supplier inclusion, renewable energy, waste reduction and governance, reflecting a broader shift among South African companies towards integrating sustainability into core business operations.
The report comes against a difficult labour-market backdrop. Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey puts the country’s unemployment rate at 33.6%, while youth unemployment remains substantially higher. For businesses, the challenge extends beyond creating jobs. Skills development, household financial resilience and access to meaningful economic opportunities are increasingly becoming part of the social dimension of corporate sustainability, particularly in an economy where weak employment prospects continue to constrain household incomes and consumption.
Empact said it began a deliberate process of embedding sustainability across its operations in 2021, organised around five priorities: empowering employees, improving waste management, using its supply chain to generate social and environmental value, improving energy efficiency, and strengthening diversity and inclusion. Sustainability oversight now falls under the mandate of the company’s board-level social, ethics, transformation and sustainability committee, while executive remuneration is linked to defined sustainability performance indicators.
That governance structure is significant because it moves ESG beyond the sustainability function and places accountability closer to corporate decision-making. The growing emphasis on sustainability-linked performance reflects a wider change in how companies are being assessed by investors, regulators, customers and employees. For African businesses, the practical challenge is increasingly how to translate commitments into measurable changes in operating costs, workforce outcomes, supply-chain resilience and environmental performance.
Empact’s approach places its workforce at the centre of that transition. The company reports that women account for 73.4% of its employees and Africans represent 88.8% of its workforce. It has also introduced programmes aimed at widening participation and addressing specific barriers to inclusion, including a partnership with eDeaf that has resulted in the organisation’s first deaf trainer. Initiatives focused on gender-based violence, men’s mental health and community participation form part of a broader effort to connect workplace inclusion with employee wellbeing.
Skills development is another significant component. Empact provides training through learnerships, management development and professional skills programmes, positioning workforce capability as both a social investment and a business requirement. In South Africa, where unemployment remains structurally high, investment in skills can have implications beyond individual employees by influencing household incomes, productivity and the availability of talent across sectors.
The company has also sought to address the financial pressures faced by employees. Its Paymenow programme is designed to reduce dependence on informal lending, while Randgo provides savings on household essentials. Empact says these interventions have contributed to a reduction in garnishee orders among employees. Such initiatives illustrate an increasingly important dimension of corporate social sustainability: financial wellbeing can influence employee stability, productivity and household resilience just as directly as traditional community investment.
The same principle is evident in Empact’s supply-chain strategy. The company reports that 45% of its listed suppliers are qualifying small and emerging enterprises, while 51% of annual supplier expenditure is directed towards Black-owned businesses. Supplier development can provide a mechanism for larger companies to extend economic participation beyond their direct workforce, particularly in economies where small and emerging businesses face persistent barriers to finance, market access and corporate procurement opportunities.
Environmental measures form the other major part of the strategy. Empact operates a 224.6 kWp hybrid solar photovoltaic system at its Linbro Park head office and is seeking to expand its capacity. The company says the installation currently supplies about 37% of the facility’s electricity requirements. It has also scaled up an electric-vehicle pilot within its Supercare division, although it recognises that a fully electric fleet remains difficult given infrastructure constraints across its national operating footprint.
This incremental approach reflects the practical challenges facing South African businesses during the energy transition. While renewable energy and electrification can reduce emissions and exposure to energy-price volatility, companies must also contend with infrastructure availability, capital requirements and the operational realities of moving away from conventional technologies. The transition therefore depends not only on national energy policy but on individual businesses identifying where decarbonisation is technically and financially viable.
Waste management provides another example of how ESG objectives are being incorporated into everyday operations. Empact measures food waste across its food-service sites and has set a target of reducing food waste by 20% by 2030. Composting and anaerobic fermentation have been introduced at approximately 40% of its food sites to divert organic waste from landfill. The approach places data at the centre of environmental management, allowing waste reduction to be treated as an operational performance issue rather than simply a corporate responsibility initiative.
The company also works with clients to introduce more energy- and water-efficient equipment and operational practices. That extends the potential environmental impact beyond Empact’s directly controlled facilities to the hundreds of locations where it provides services. For service-sector businesses, such indirect influence can be important because much of their environmental footprint is embedded in supply chains, equipment, transportation and client operations.
The report illustrates a wider issue facing African companies as ESG expectations become more closely connected to business strategy. Sustainability increasingly requires companies to make decisions about capital expenditure, procurement, workforce management and risk rather than treating environmental and social programmes as separate corporate initiatives.
For South Africa, the significance is particularly pronounced. The country’s just energy transition is taking place alongside high unemployment, inequality, infrastructure constraints and pressure on businesses to remain competitive. Companies that invest in cleaner technologies while developing workers and broadening supplier participation are effectively navigating several of these challenges simultaneously, although the financial costs and implementation constraints remain material.
Empact’s first sustainability report therefore provides a case study in how ESG can be translated into operational decisions: solar power becomes an energy-management strategy; food-waste measurement becomes a resource-efficiency tool; supplier development becomes an economic-inclusion mechanism; and employee training becomes both a social intervention and a workforce investment.
The broader test, however, will be whether such measures generate durable improvements that can be measured over time. For African businesses, the credibility of ESG increasingly rests less on the volume of commitments disclosed and more on whether sustainability objectives influence budgets, incentives, procurement decisions, operational systems and governance.
As companies across the continent navigate climate risks, energy transitions, employment pressures and evolving disclosure expectations, the experience of organisations such as Empact points to a more integrated model of corporate sustainability. The emerging question is no longer simply whether businesses have ESG policies, but whether those policies can withstand the practical pressures of running a competitive enterprise while creating measurable value for employees, suppliers, communities and the environment.
