Lafarge Africa Plc, emerged the overall first runner-up with six nominations at the 8th Nigeria Corporate Social Responsibility Awards (SERAs) recently held in Lagos.
The company also won an award as the Best Company in labour and employment practices. This recognises Lafarge Africa’s good labour practices, employee safety and welfare packages, career growth and development in addition to its commitment to impacting positively on its host communities and the Nigeria community through continuous engagement of its key stakeholders.
Furthermore, Group MD/CEO of Lafarge Africa Plc, Guillaume Roux, was a recipient of the Sustainability Champion award. Roux said that sustainability is key to the company, which has been operating in Nigeria for over 50 years, with over 98% of its employees being Nigerians.
“We work hard to develop the communities in Nigeria and provide opportunities for our employees, our partners, our key distributors and the masons that work with us. We train 4,000 masons annually,” he continued.
“We want to contribute to building better cities and a better Nigeria. So, if we create more opportunities for our communities, more work and better polity, we will improve construction and we will create more construction. When people make wealth, the first thing they do is to build a house.”
Explaining the rationale behind the annual awards, the founder of SERAs, Ken Egbas said it was “to make companies understand that prosperity comes with responsibility. He said about N27.8 billion was committed into CSR across the country in the current year, and that 69 companies enlisted for this year’s awards.
http://ngrguardiannews.com/business/186733-seras-2014-lafarge-africa-emerges-first-runner-up
