A Purpose Beyond Profit

Since its founding in 1996, Sayga has fundamentally changed the landscape of the milling and baking industry in Sudan. It has transformed a sector that relied on hand-ground, low-quality wheat imported in limited quantities into a revolutionized arena led by a responsible business committed to creating shared value for all its stakeholders. Along with producing healthy, affordable, and accessible staple foods, this approach has resulted in an improved quality of life for industry workers and consumers, and solidified Sayga’s position as a leader in the baking industry.

As a business, we appreciate that investments of time and resources are not only about improving the bottom line, but also improving the social, economic, and natural environments in which our business operates. Our Baking Industry Development initiative is built on improving local circumstances in food industry practice and aligns with the local community’s priorities and needs. Through it, we have initiated a number of ongoing programs directed at adding sustainable value to our society. 

Our popular Baking Development Center (BDC) is a modern facility based in Khartoum that offers free, certified classes year-round to baking professionals and the general public. Our courses are most popular with the local women from our target segment. They register for one of the five-day classes through our company call center, leading many of them to expand on the experience and become entrepreneurs. The curriculum also incorporates management classes for bakery owners, distribution agents, and partners. We forged partnerships with civil society organizations to facilitate vocational training for the socially, economically, and physically disadvantaged – including customized classes for the blind and hard of hearing – and donate half of all products from the classroom to local charities through our Food Sharing Programme.

Eager to reach the largest number of people all across Sudan, the BDC instituted a traveling trainer center. The five customized mobile bakery schools are designed to reach communities in remote rural areas, so as to service the majority segment of the population that does not have access to our Khartoum-based classes. As with the BDC, they offer classes that empower households and bakers with new skills and nutritional education, as well as offer technical support and equipment distribution for bakeries. The mobile schools are vital in allowing us to reach communities all over Sudan and train the majority of our beneficiaries.
To date, more than 160,000 bakers and community members have been trained by the resident center and the mobile bakery schools.

In 2012, the BDC signed on to a formal partnership with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to provide trainings and technical assistance to improve income-generation opportunities among underprivileged groups in South Kordofan. Outside of the classroom, a technical service team provides bakeries access to otherwise unattainable equipment at a subsidized cost, with free related services. The BDC has been committed from its conception to building up the baking industry and broader society along with our business.

Sayga’s engagement with bakeries also seeks to change harmful practices. We constantly educate stakeholders on the need for hygienic operations, which is stressed in our trainings, and we provide them with the tools to implement what they learn.

The Green Bakery initiative was launched in direct response to the environmentally harmful, often dangerous and unhygienic conditions that were observed in bakeries across Sudan. Sayga intervened to shift the industry away from certain harmful practices: using wood-burning ovens, ice for chilling dough, and potassium bromide. In return, bakeries gained better productivity and temperature control, reduced their carbon footprint, and required less maintenance. By creating alternatives to harmful practices, coupled with education, the Green Bakery initiative has enabled stakeholders to upgrade the baking industry’s operations to be more safe, hygienic, and environmentally friendly. The initiative also helped address deforestation, which is a rapidly worsening and critical concern in Sudan.

Through these activities and others, Sayga implements our ambitious Baking Industry Development initiative through three main channels: business support, technical support, and capacity-building. Our business support is directed toward Sudanese bakeries across the country and involves valuable services. We supply industrial baking equipment and work tools to bakeries, and cooperate with bakery owners to develop a working environment that is accommodating to modern equipment and techniques. Our staff also helps bakeries with feasibility studies and management consulting to develop their businesses.

Central to all of our efforts is our technical service team, which builds relationships with our customers in order to offer the support they need and help shape the industry. They make daily field visits, offer advice, provide services, and otherwise work hard to consistently raise standards. Through our technical support activities, we improve baking processes by educating industry workers on how to use different products, on avoiding production problems, and methods to increasing production. These activities also encompass the free maintenance we provide for industrial baking equipment and the subsidized machinery we provide bakeries. This arrangement enables us to help modernize bakeries and improve their productivity.
Capacity-building is the heart of our initiative and is focused on training baking industry workers as well as conducting management courses for bakery owners and our distribution agents.

Our employees constantly develop new initiatives to improve the baking industry; whether it is hygiene-awareness campaigns or a national baking competition, the activities remain relevant and dynamic despite the difficult economic situation and business environment in Sudan.

Recognized for its remarkable impact, the BDC was awarded the CSR Arabia Award in 2010 for Best Project, making Sayga the first Sudanese company to receive an international CSR award. Sayga also won the 2013 Social Investment Pioneer Award in the Shared Value category, recognizing the extensive work the company has done to develop Sudan’s baking industry through social investment. Sayga’s Baking Industry Development initiative has truly created shared value in the baking industry in ways that are good for business, good for the community, and good for development.