Lesaffre commits to a literacy project for all its factory employees in Egypt

With its literacy program, Lesaffre Egypt is giving its employees a chance to progress and improve their skills. Lesaffre is convinced that tackling the challenge of illiteracy will allow the group to progress by drawing on the development of its employees' skills.
Category
Human Resources
Date
2017
Location
Egypt
key figure
from 9% illiterate employees to 1% after the training

In line with its CSR commitment, Lesaffre Egypt launched a literacy program in 2017 aimed at all of its illiterate employees.
The objective of this approach? Give workers who have never been to school the opportunity to acquire the basics of reading and writing, while raising awareness among staff of the importance of expanding their skills. Because it allows more autonomy and free will, literacy contributes to economic growth, reduces poverty and crime, and promotes democracy. Also, beyond its social dimension, this program aimed to increase the productivity of trained employees.
And it worked! While 9% of the employees were illiterate before the program, at the end of 4 to 7 months of education, this rate has reduced to 1%.
The courses were given after working hours and were supervised by voluntary employees from the HR & administration team. Thanks to everyone’s energy, the beneficiary employees can now perform tasks without any mistakes and all of them have improved their productivity.
For us, it is very rewarding to see them with better career development opportunities and higher self-esteem.
Encouraged by the positive achievements, we intend to promote the literacy program on a larger scale to cover the spouses of our employees who were not given the chance of a proper education.

We consider our employees to be one of our most valuable assets, and we wanted to stress the importance of developing their skills.
Nanaries
Human Resources - Egypt