Site teams, including social performance, are required to submit and manage an annual budget. As the team’s budget needs to be approved each year, this can have implications for delivery of a social performance work programme. Consider the following areas of potential concern relating to annual budget-planning cycle:
- An annual budget cycle can affect the social performance team’s ability to enter into multi-year partnerships for delivery of socio-economic development programmes with third-party providers. Social Performance Managers should try to avoid a situation where ongoing programme implementation is threatened by delays in budget approval and/or reductions or stoppage of the approved funds. They should aim to have contractual multi-year agreements signed off (or agreed in principle) by the site and relevant authority at the Business Unit level. Additionally, social performance budget items should align with activities and commitments made in the Sustainable Mining Plan and broader Life of Asset Plan.
- Expenditure levels on projects should not be used as results metrics, as this may dilute a focus on the relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of interventions, and discourage partnerships and leveraging resources from sources other than Anglo American budgets.
- The site , supported by the Social Performance Manager, should ensure that all planned activities detailed in the site have a corresponding budget. Actions in the will typically be delivered by multiple functions. The site social performance-related spend will therefore be distributed across several cost centres, while site leadership should ensure that functions with implementation responsibilities have included an associated budget.
- It is important to have the budget for activities broken down to a sufficient level of detail e.g. include details for each specific initiative and if these are tied to commitments such as permits or other legal requirements. This approach can help demonstrate all funds are pre-allocated and avoid the situation where ad hoc community projects are agreed to during the year, potentially leaving budget shortfalls elsewhere.
Consider the following checklist of items to include when putting together an annual budget:
- Forecast staff numbers and associated salaries;
- External training requirements for Social Performance team and for wider Site Leadership;
- projects including multi-year partnership annual payments (e.g. programmes on skills building, business support, etc) as well as Corporate Social Investment and Collaborative Regional Development (CRD) spend as relevant;
- External impact assessments; e.g. Project ;
- Impact mitigations; e.g. traffic-safety campaigns, contributions to social infrastructure, community health awareness-raising campaigns;
- Technical support to be provided by consultancies; e.g. to develop a Resettlement Action Plan;
- Logistical costs to support community engagements; e.g. printing, travel, accommodation, drinks, room hire;
- Community Engagement Forum related costs;
- Participatory monitoring costs;
- Technical experts to support monitoring on issues of community importance; and
- Third-party evaluation costs.