Construction World March 2017

COMMENT

CESA president, Lynne Pretorius, recently indicated that her theme for 2017 is for CESA to take the lead in transforming its membership and the industry.

The fact that there are so few female engineers in the consulting engineering industry has raised serious concerns about transformation in general.

There are various reasons why Pretorius decided on sustainable transformation as her theme. As of June 2016, 53% of the CESA membership was white. When only professional engineers are considered, this figure increases to 84%. Of the 533 firms on CESA’s database, only 122 firms are black-owned, between 4 and 6% of the staff employed by CESA are woman and of these only 12% are actually consulting engineering professionals. This, shockingly, after 20 years of measures to rectify the ills of the past – the most notable of these are Broad-based Black Empowerment and the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework. Brown says that such policies often resulted in ‘fronting’ and that true, sustainable transformation was often not achieved. As a result questions are being asked about the effectiveness of the BBBEE scorecard in realising transformation. Driving transformation The presidential theme for CESA this year is driven by CESA’s transformation committee – this comprises members of both established and emerging firms. As its main aim, this committee will promote transformation as an ethical business practice and monitor progress made by its members. It will aim to increase the participation of black engineering professionals at various levels within member firms. The transformation of individual firms will in time lead to the transformation of CESA as a whole. It has identified various

Construction World is publishing a supplement on behalf of the Southern African Light Steel Frame Building Association SASFA. The supplement will celebrate this building method and highlight how it

is becoming increasingly popular. • Please contact Erna Ooshuizen (ernao@crown.co.za) for more detail.

support programmes for small, medium and micro enterprises – such enterprises make up 95% of CESA’s membership. It will furthermore partner with government departments to second young engineering staff in the public sector to the private sector, launch awareness programmes for women engineers, while BBEEE scorecards will be more detailed so as to measure and monitor actual transformation.

Wilhelm du Plessis Editor

@ConstWorldSA

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EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER Wilhelm du Plessis constr@crown.co.za ADVERTISING MANAGER Erna Oosthuizen ernao@crown.co.za LAYOUT & DESIGN Lesley Testa CIRCULATION Karen Smith

PUBLISHER Karen Grant

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CONSTRUCTION WORLD MARCH 2017