Sunshine Holdings has focused its Corporate Social Responsibility projects in the education and healthcare sectors and initiated significant projects through the year. The group’s CSR manager along with the HR heads of the Group are leading this effort, with active participation from many employees.
Vish Govindasamy, Group Managing Director commented, “an integral part of our vision is to be a role model corporate citizen and respected employer and our core values of being socially responsible and contributing to nation building drive our CSR commitments in these key sectors.”
In the education sector, the Group recently donated Rs one million to the Council for Business with Britain (CBB), which has been working through the British Council on the English Language Teaching (ELT) project, intended to upgrade the English skills among the teachers in the rural areas. The initiative would help improve the quality of English teaching practices in schools as English, being a link language, is essential in this arena. This funding will be targeted towards teachers in the upcountry areas, where the group subsidiaries plantations are located, as a community improvement project. The Group’s plantations subsidiary, Watawala Plantations, has participated in significant projects to build skills in these areas, and has been successfully running its own vocational training centre for disabled children of its plantation associates for over a decade.
In the healthcare sector, the Group has donated intra-ocular lenses, consumables and medication to 335 needy patients in the North and East for cataract surgeries for the National Secretariat of Vision 2020, a project designed as a part of the implementation of the National Eye Care Programme. This project is endorsed by the Ministry of Health to prevent and control avoidable blindness as a part of the national health system. Cataract has become one of the priority disease areas identified in the National Eye Care Programme for intervention. They have donated over Rs 800,000 so far and continue to support this initiative. The Group’s healthcare subsidiary, SBL, has supported several medical camp activities across the country and is also a major contributor for continuous medical education programmes to healthcare professionals.
