Quality IT education - South Africa
iSchoolAfrica programme was launched at Lehlabile Secondary School in partnership with Mamelodi Initiative in July 2020 and we continued to support this program in 2023.
The objective of the iSchoolAfrica #MyFuture programme is to empower Grades 10, 11 and 12 learners who have the potential to succeed through a combination of iPad technology, access to relevant curriculum content and online school subject-focused lessons.
In 2023 we added another school to the programs that we support. We are now also sponsoring the “Everyone Can Code programme” at Liv Lanseria for students in Grade 4 to 7. There are a total of 76 students at Liv Lanseria who benefit from this coding program. Iress hosted two coding days in 2023 at the Iress Johannesburg office with the students sponsored through the Iress iSchoolAfrica programmes.
Supporting skilled employment with Talent Beyond Boundaries
Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB) is a global not-for-profit that works with governments and businesses to give refugees and other displaced people access to skilled employment opportunities.
Iress has partnered with TBB since 2017 and since then, Iress has hired and relocated six skilled refugees and their families to Australia and the UK through the TBB program, as well as provided financial support for TBB to enable people in more locations to access skilled migration pathways.
Over the years Iress has expanded its partnership with TBB to provide more reliable and meaningful support to their work and efforts. The expanded partnership includes a fixed financial agreement of $750,000 for five years, in addition to pro-bono technical volunteering and communications and marketing support to further promote the benefits of TBB’s skilled migration program in Australia and around the world.
In 2023, representatives from Iress attended a Refugee Summit in Jordan. The Summit focused on how global communities can improve labour mobility for refugees and how TBB could generate greater scale, as well as encouraging participants to commit to meaningful action to support that.
Provision of services to charities
Caring for Communities and People (CCP)
Throughout 2023 a small group of Iress Employees in the UK have been helping CCP with skilled-based volunteering to improve their Hamper Scamper Referrer process.
The previous form used by CCP was unsuitable as it only allowed 30 inputs per submission, however, a number of their referrers have over 200 children that they refer. It also didn’t allow for submissions to be edited by the referrer and in addition to that the code generated for each gift had to be generated by hand for each gift taking into account siblings. The Iress team working on the project has been able to automate the generation of the gift code as well as establish a method to identify siblings and are fully in control of the new cloud-based solution.
