BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – Today (Wednesday, November 27, 2024) will surely go down as a memorable day for three Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), which shared an amount of E868 000 donated by First National Bank (FNB) Eswatini Foundation for the financial year 2024/25.
The donation took place at FNB Eswatini Headquarters in Ezulwini. The NGOs that benefitted from the bank’s gesture include Junior Achievement (JA) Eswatini, Days for Girls, and Gogo Nde Care Centre. JA Eswatini got E271 000, Days for Girls got E394 000, while Gogo Nde Care Centre got E203 000.
FNB Eswatini Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who is also the Chairman of FNB Eswatini Foundation, said this was a way of re-affirming their commitment as a bank to empowering Emaswati to help in addressing challenges facing the country. The foundation, according to the CEO, did this being guided by programmatic pillars, namely gender diversity and inclusivity, knowledge economy, entrepreneurship, humanitarian support, and environmental and climate change.
As a result today, Dlamini said they would be focusing on three of these pillars, which were gender diversity and inclusion (Days for Girls), humanitarian support (Gogo Nde Care Centre), and entrepreneurship (JA Eswatini).
Reacting to FNB’s kind gesture, JA Eswatini Executive Director Phestsile Masilela thanked FNB for identifying them as a partner to work with in career development of young people in the country. She said her company had a mandate of enhancing financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and career development for adolescents and youth. She said job shadowing was part of the mandate to improve professional lives of young people.
Masilela said there was a mismatch of skills and many students could not be employed and many of them went to restart after finishing their high school. This has led to young people losing hope about life. She said JA Eswatini wanted to restore the hope and make the youth believe it was still possible to make their dreams a reality. The job shadowing was meant to expose the children to a work environment so that they would know how they were supposed to behave at work. She said the job shadowing enabled them to make an informed decision about their career choices.
The director said they wished to rope in as much as 1 000 of the school-going children to help them get exposure to work and improve their professional lives. She said at some point, they helped 200 children, but the COVID-19 outbreak disturbed them to a point of suspending their programme. She said the event today would be a breakthrough for them to deal with bigger numbers again.
Days for Girls Director Lindiwe Dladla said the sponsorship would help them help many young girls to have access to sanitary towels. She said many of the young girls were disturbed in schools because they felt embarrassed to go on periods, with no ways to address the problem. Dladla said what also made it difficult for the girls to have access to the sanitary towels was that they were still taxed in the country.
The director wondered why such essential products were still taxed as a luxury. She emphasised that girls were born this way. They were made such that at some point, they would go for their periods and products meant to address such instances were not supposed to be taxed. She said they wanted to help as many as 2 000 girls have access to these products, especially in Lubombo and Shiselweni.
Gogo Nde Care Centre Member Solomon Mabuza thanked FNB for the kind gesture. Mabuza said the care centre had been in existence since 2002 and many children had been helped. She said Gogo Nde, who was the founder of the care centre, used her pension money to start the centre within Mtsambama Constituency. Since its existence, Mabuza said the centre has also helped children from other constituencies, particularly in Shiselweni.
