MLC's Romano Valenti on building South Africa's youth through education and entreprise
Updated | By Tando Ntunja
Education and enterprise are two priorities often touted by leaders in government as solutions towards the high unemployment crisis South African youth face. Learn how MLC's Romano Valenti makes these priorities are reality through The Sun International CEO SleepOut™.
Group Executive Director of MLC Quantity Surveying, Romano Valenti is a leader that seeks to take on youth development with great gusto and vigor: “We all have a social responsibility to the upliftment of underprivileged youth. But also as a Group, we have the MLC’s Corporate Social Responsibility And Enterprise Development Initiatives, we support the Sparrow School, which is an entirely non-profit initiative that provides high-quality education on a non-racial basis to vulnerable children; we support that initiative and we have been supporting it for the last 9-10 years.”
Romano shares additional motivations behind participating in The Sun International CEO SleepOut™: “We also need to support initiatives such as this one to get kids off the streets and get them into education facilities that will better their lives. This is the perfect fit for our company, we completely support it.”
Although his name is of Italian origin, Romano is a born and bred South African, and has qualified along with gaining experience as a professional Quantity Surveyor here. With a career history spreading over more than two decades at MLC, Romano is a Group Executive Director managing MLC’s Kwazulu-Natal branch office. As MLC Group’s CEO designate, Romano would like to see MLC’s strong company culture continue the drive towards change and upliftment via support to external organisations, as well as offering in house training to nurture our successors for the future.
With MLC's Corporate Social Responsibility And Enterprise Development Initiatives, the emphasis is on vocational and entrepreneurial training with a programme in place to set up promising students in businesses of their own, with a goal to develop independent, responsible citizens, who contribute positively towards society. Sparrow Schools has positioned itself to assist children with mild to severe learning disabilities, who do not have access to remedial education due to financial constraints and without which they would be prone to fall through a gap in the education system and literally drop out of school.
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