HAWE Hydraulik receives German Entrepreneurship Award for training project

HAWE Hydraulik have won the German Entrepreneurship Award in the "Business for Development" category with a project led by trainees. A combination of practical training and the latest training models help deliver specialist training and detailed insights into hydraulics to people in Botswana.

The award was presented on 12 February 2019 by Gerd Müller, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, and by Akufo-Addo Dankwa, President of Ghana. Supervisory board member Dr. Alexa Haeusgen and Anja Lehr, Head of Personnel, were present to receive the award on behalf of HAWE. It is presented every two years by Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft e. V. (CDG) and comes with prize money of €35,000. The websites states: "The award-winning companies make a verifiable contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with their projects or innovative business models".

The aim is for the prize money to be fed into the winning projects and product ideas, thus adding further stimulus. In this way, HAWE is organising a maintenance workshop in Botswana. The idea came about when trainees commissioned three training models in autumn 2018 in the Garbarone training centre. Aside from the new training models, the training centre still has old welding equipment with extraction units as well as lathing and milling machines which are used for training.

The old machinery is either barely or not at all functional. The aim now is not to use the money to repair these, but to train skilled workers locally so that they can complete the repair themselves and in future maintain these machines and the new training models independently. The plan is for a group of skilled HAWE maintenance workers to fly to Botswana in 2019 for this training. Additionally, the necessary replacement parts will be purchased or constructed in-house.

As part of the project, a total of five training models were built by the trainees. Three of these have now been successfully implemented in Botswana and train-the-trainer courses have been completed. The other two training models will be supplied to Nigeria in 2019. An equivalent project is also being planned for Kenya. The VDMA (Association of German Machinery and Plant Manufacturers) training project "Skilled workers for Africa", which provided the inspiration, covers these three countries.


Source: hawe.com (press release on the website of the company HAWE Hydraulik), revised by iMOVE, April 2019