CSR Award: AFGRI and Baker & McKenzie – African Legal Awards 2015
AFGRI recognised for subsistence farming project and Bakers for its work on fraud prevention training in Tanzania
November 25, 2015 at 07:30 AM
2 minute read
Sponsored by AfricaLegalJobs.com
Finalists
AFGRI
Baker & McKenzie
Bowman Gilfillan Africa Group
Hogan Lovells
Linklaters
Webber Wentzel
Winners: AFGRI and Baker & McKenzie
The CSR award was jointly awarded to AFGRI for a project to help subsistence farmers and Baker & McKenzie for its work on training for the Tanzanian Prevention and Combatting of Corruption Bureau.
AFGRI's CSR work centres on trying to create food security across Africa. Close to 270 million Africans, mostly children, are undernourished every day. The continent meanwhile is expected to be the region of greatest population growth between now and 2050.
The company felt that by supporting small scale subsistence farmers it would be able to improve local food supplies and their reliability. It has been working with Zambian vegetable farmers to improve their production yields, partly by enabling the use of mechanised agricultural equipment by making it available to rent. It also helped finance some farmers.
Given there was no legal precedent for the project AFGRI created a framework from scratch that was compliant with South African and Zambian law including a rental and finance agreement that was in plain language so the farmers could understand what it entailed. The model and framework have already been replicated in Uganda and Zimbabwe with plans to roll it out further across Africa and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Bakers' work in Tanzania focussed on training local prosecutors with the aim of boosting the success rate of corruption prosecutions. The firm was approached through the National Institute for Trial Advocacy to help fill a training gap that meant that prosecution success rates were around the 46% mark in Tanzania, versus rates of around 95% in countries like the UK and US.
In May 2015, more than 70 prosecutors and 20 magistrate judges attended a five-day programme at the law school in Dar es Salaam, with the course programme and teaching materials created with input from Bakers, Lawyers without Borders and DLA Piper. The schedule included an overview of corruption laws; electronic evidence and persuasive arguments.
Pictured from left to right: Pieter Badenhorst, legal director, AFGRI, Wendy Bampton, director, AfricaLegalJobs.com
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