KENYA – Women and the environment have emerged winners of East African Breweries’ push towards a sustainable future.
In the recently released 2021 sustainability report, EABL reported a 7.4% increase in female hires, majorly as a result of the company’s graduate programs focused on building gender diversity.
The company further notes that as of 2021, 14% of those in the brewer’s senior management and 42% of those sitting on its board were women.
As a result of the program, EABL now boasts of having 4 women master brewers, an all-female crew in Uganda-line 5, and another female-only team in Tanzania in charge of the cube division.
This is a great step towards the company’s ambition to achieve 50% representation of women in leadership roles by 2030.
“We want to scale up our efforts, and boost the strong results we have achieved to date with our women-focused training and graduate opportunities,” EABL said.
“This includes adding more women to our graduate training program and increasing our investment in training and capacity building for local communities.”
The company which is part of the Diageo group further notes that it has a goal to recruit 30 women into the commercial early career programme in 2022.
“We also hope to increase the number of PWDs in our supply chain, as well as extend our reach to include Uganda and Tanzania in the coming year.”
EABL doubles down on environment protection
The environment being the core of any sustainability program was also the highlight of EABL’s 2021 sustainability report with great progress being made particularly in water and energy use.
According to the report, EABL’s water projects carried out between 2020 and 2021 improved water availability and access for 30,000 people living in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
“On the environment side, to date, we have planted over 1,300,000 trees around the country with a strong success rate of 85%,” said John Musunga, Managing Director of Kenya Breweries.
“Almost 400,00 of these were planted between 2017 and 2021. KBL has also made significant investments (Ksh. 22 billion/ $202 million) in retrofitting our plants to be completely green.”
Additionally, between 2021 and 2021, the company noted that 198,000m3 of water used on its sites was replenished and reused.
EABL says that between 2016 to date, a total of 1,006,138m3 of water has been replenished at its factories, repressing 30.6% of the target to replenish 3,282,463m3 of water by 2026.
When it comes to tackling climate change, the maker of Tusker, Serengeti, and Bell beers noted that it had managed to achieve a 20.6% reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions between 2019 and 2021.
The company also noted that its sites across the region utilize an average of 82% of sustainable grid electricity, enabling the company to significantly cut down its carbon footprint.
The company further pledged to continue maintaining its zero to waste policy in its direct operations and a zero to landfill operations throughout its supply chain.
The company further supports regenerative agriculture by providing 60,000 farmers across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with skills and resources to enable them to adopt sustainable farming practices.
Having made substantial progress in 2021, EABL now plans to invest in greening its facilities and utilizing clean energy.
This includes rolling out biomass boilers at the beginning of 2022 with locally sourced renewable fuel in addition to implementing solar installations in all of its breweries with the capacity to meet a tenth of our electricity needs.
“Eventually we will work towards 100% renewable electricity by 2030 in all of our plants,” EABL committed.
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