Our communities

Ensuring positive socioeconomic impact by unlocking shared prosperity through supporting inclusive education is core to Datatec's purpose.

Primarily through the work of our subsidiaries and through the Datatec Educational and Technology Foundation (“the Foundation”), we actively work towards ensuring that education is more inclusive and socially relevant by investing in eliminating barriers to education and driving access to quality learning opportunities.

Datatec has committed to work and partner with organisations that align with its responsible business philosophy and that offer programmes which support education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (“STEM”) to empower disadvantaged communities, and which facilitate interventions to increase the number of women and minority groups in the technology industry. We seek to positively impact the communities in which we operate through four community support interventions:

The Foundation

Datatec is deeply committed to empowering people at the grassroots level to reduce poverty and inequality. It has been another successful year for the Foundation, which met its principal objective to improve the quality of education in South Africa and create opportunities for those less fortunate.

The Foundation provides funding support to organisations that aim to improve education within underprivileged communities in South Africa, with spend primarily directed into school-level intervention programmes for learners and teachers, and educational bursaries. Other initiatives include providing technology infrastructure and skills development for unemployed youth. In FY25, the Foundation contributed ZAR10.0 million to education programmes in South Africa.

Through its donations, the Foundation continues to achieve a strong overall impact by:

For detailed information on the Foundation's community activities, refer to the Datatec responsible business report and the Foundation report published on www.datatec.com. This includes detailed FY26 targets and progress against the FY25 targets published in the FY24 annual report.

* The Afrika Tikkun organisation, which accounted for many of the FY24 beneficiaries, did not receive support in FY25.

Datatec flagship project

In FY25, Datatec continued to support the Concern Worldwide "Promoting access to STEM education" project which directly benefited 702 learners and their teachers.
The project reached a further 2 849 learners who participated in the science fair in the Marsabit county of Kenya. Datatec invested US$100 000 in the project in FY25 (and a total of US$150 000 to date), providing mobile laboratories, science kits and training resources for eight primary schools in the county.

There has been strong progress in performance on integrated science exams in 2024, some of which could be attributed to the provision of mobile laboratories and integrated kits. A comparative analysis of four project schools shows that there was an increase in performance year-on-year from 40% average result in 2023, to 61% in 2024.

Datatec emergency response

Datatec has an emergency fund available for donations to help responses to humanitarian emergencies. In FY25, we donated a total of US$23 650 to crises in South Africa, Gaza and Spain.

Further detail on divisional community efforts can be found in the Value through our divisions section of this report.

Mandela Day

In FY25, Datatec head office partnered with the Tomorrow Trust and Reshomile Primary School in Diepsloot. The team spent the day engaging in educational and fun STEM activities such as Volcano Experiments, Mathletics and Robotics. In addition, Datatec donated much-needed catering equipment and utensils for the school's nutrition programme which ensures that each learner receives at least one meal for every school day.

Education in the community – divisional performance

The priorities for the community programmes at each of our divisions are aligned with strategic projects focused on three educational areas:

• Driving STEM: supporting education in STEM to empower disadvantaged communities
• Diversity in technology: facilitating interventions to increase the number of women and minority groups in the industry
• Skills for technology: training and retraining adults to enter and be supported within the technology industry

Across our divisions, there were a total of 43 education-focused projects in FY25, benefiting over 1 800 people. Over US$400 000 was invested in community projects (including non-education related initiatives) and charitable donations.