On September 17 Bidvest Insurance staff as well as six other sponsor companies headed off in groups assisted by Bidvest McCarthy off-road vehicles to participate in the 2016 Rally to READ initiative.
The teams departed from Umhlanga in convoy for the central Drakensberg area to deliver much needed educational supplies to twelve underprivileged schools in those areas.
This was the third and final visit for the KZN portion of the nationwide Rally to READ programme of which Bidvest Insurance host. During the early hours of the morning on September 17 at the Bidvest Insurance Umhlanga offices, vehicles were loaded with library boxes, stationary, teacher-training support materials, sports equipment, toys and other much needed educational resources that are intended to be used at the various underprivileged schools.
The donated material is provided by the READ Educational Trust, an organisation which began after the 1976 student uprisings and is today committed to improving the language and literacy levels of South African learners. The Rally programme was established in 1998 when the Human Sciences Research Council approached the McCarthy dealerships and asked them to provide four wheel drive vehicles needed to reach rural schools as part of a study on school resources.
Seeing the dire need for supplies, the once off expedition quickly became a national project for McCarthy. Now a Bidvest Group initiative, convoys of vehicles transport educational material and resources from five cities across the country throughout the year to some of South Africa’s most remote and neglected schools.
Programme sponsors visit their schools during the three-year period and are given the opportunity to monitor and evaluate learners’ progress as well as the programmes’ overall success.
“Being part of this deserving initiative for the past two years has been a humbling experience and we are proud to be completing our third year with the same schools to provide them with the resources they need to educate the children in their communities,” state Lucy Cooke, Marketing Manager of Bidvest Insurance.
