Mining company Glencore has handed over eight classrooms to the Mashishing TVET College in Mpumalanga. The company funded and constructed state-of-the-art classrooms as part of its social responsibility.
The TVET College has had infrastructure and resource challenges since its inception in 2013.
The Ehlanzeni TVET College’s Mashishing campus was accommodated at an old Public Works Department building. In 2019, the mining company which operates in the area helped refurbish the building. It has now handed over eight classrooms to the college, which struggled with the enrolment of students. Nearly 600 students were admitted to the college, to the disappointment of many young people, who wanted to further their studies closer to home.
Students have welcomed the latest gesture.
“With the additional classrooms, the college has a capacity to enrol about 1000 students. Campus Manager, Bongani Kwayiyo says more programmes will be introduced for the benefit of the students.
“The priority of the department is the access of students in TVET Colleges, so currently we have enrolled 540 students, there is need to grow the community, expect more from us to enrol more learners, but we don’t have the infrastructure. The infrastructure is not enough so this investment is going to assist us to accommodate at least 940 students and now currently we are moving towards that direction, it’s going to assist to introduce more programmes because currently we only running four programmes.”
Glencore has so far spent R12.5 million on this college. Chief Corporate Investment Officer, Conroy van der Westhuizen says the college was established out of nothing.
“In 2019 we convected the old dilapidated old building used to belong to the Road Transport, we converted this building into new TVET College here in Mashishing Lydenburg. We invested R7 million initially in what we called phase one, to convert the old building to the TVET College and now today we are opening the new eight classrooms that we constructed here at the cost of another R5 million. We doing this in phase approach to ensure that we can get our local students to give access to a local TVET College. In total at the stage, we spent R12,5 million but we have a full flash TVET College that we established out of nothing.”
It’s envisaged that the college will produce a workforce that will be relevant to the mining company.
