CSR PROJECTS · 7 min read
Inside Brandix’s Community Programme: 321 Projects, Seven Forums and the One Number Its Peers Don’t Publish
Sri Lanka’s largest apparel employer is privately held, unlisted, and sits outside every sustainability disclosure mandate in the country. It published a 149-page ESG report anyway — and inside it, a measure of its own community programme that none of its listed peers reports at all.
By the ESGNexus Editorial Team · August 2026 · Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Brandix Lanka is not required to publish any of this. The company is privately held, unlisted, and sits entirely outside the SLFRS S1 and S2 sustainability disclosure standards that became mandatory for Sri Lanka’s top 100 listed companies by market capitalisation on 1 January 2025. It published a 149-page ESG report for the year to 31 March 2025 anyway — its tenth consecutive annual sustainability report — with its economic, environmental, social and governance indicators covered by an Ernst & Young limited assurance engagement under SLSAE 3000 (Revised).
Inside it is one of the most granular accounts of corporate community investment available anywhere in the Sri Lankan market: project counts and beneficiary counts by category, volunteer participation and hours, community requests received and resolved, and a country-by-country investment table. That granularity is the reason this article can exist. Much Sri Lankan community reporting consists of a photograph and a total.
What the Community Programme Delivered in FY2024/25
The Provide pillar covers water, sanitation, livelihoods, disaster relief and healthcare. Brandix reports it category by category, which is what makes the year legible.
| Provide category | FY2023/24 (projects / direct beneficiaries) | FY2024/25 (projects / direct beneficiaries) |
| Water | 40 / 216 | 149 / 596 |
| Sanitation | Not reported separately | 26 / 104 |
| Model Villages | 45 / 101,855 | 72 / 357,574 |
| Livelihood projects | 2 / 51 | Not reported separately |
| Natural disaster relief | 7 / 24,250 | 13 / 52 |
| Annual blood drive | 29 / 10,974 | 24 / 5,928 |
| Eye camps | 14 / 7,408 | 12 / 4,778 |
| Health camps | 12 / 34,455 | 22 / 31,720 |
| Pillar total as stated | 149 / 179,209 | 321 / 400,815 |
Source: Brandix Lanka, ESG Report 2024/25, pp.122 and 127; Brandix Apparel, ESG Report 2023/24, p.72 — brandix.com
Water projects rose from 40 to 149, and sanitation is now a separate line item for the first time. Health camps reached 31,720 people, blood drives 5,928 and eye camps 4,778. Brandix has been Sri Lanka’s largest corporate blood donor for more than a decade, a distinction the National Blood Transfusion Service recognised again in 2024. Natural disaster relief fell from 24,250 beneficiaries to 52, which reflects the incidence of disasters during the year rather than any change in the company’s readiness to respond.
Model Villages, the largest category, grew from 45 projects to 72 and from 101,855 beneficiaries to 357,574. Brandix’s FY2023/24 report sets out what one of these projects is.
| Boosting community wellbeing (10-15km radius) through diversified social initiatives
— Brandix Apparel, ESG Report 2023/24, definition of a Model Village project |
That is a catchment measure rather than a headcount, which matters when setting the figure alongside another company’s, and we return to it below. Cumulatively, the Provide pillar has now delivered over 5,800 projects and more than 1.3 million beneficial opportunities since the first water and sanitation project in 2008.
Educate: A Rollout Completed, Not Abandoned
| Educate output | FY2023/24 | FY2024/25 |
| School-essentials packs | 26,202 | 21,989 |
| Educational scholarships | 135 | 126 |
| University scholarships | 11 | 8 |
| Right to Read projects | 556 (565,026 direct beneficiaries) | 556, all continuing from FY23/24 |
Source: Brandix Lanka, ESG Report 2024/25, p.129; Brandix Apparel, ESG Report 2023/24, p.74 — brandix.com
The Educate pillar’s headline reach looks far smaller than the previous year’s, and the explanation sits in the fourth row. Right to Read — the English-literacy programme run with the Ministry of Education, which placed interactive smartboards and reading software into 1,800 schools, trained more than 5,000 teachers and absorbed USD 1.7 million — completed its build phase. Its 556 projects appear in FY2024/25 as continuing rather than new. The programme did not stop. It stopped expanding, which is what a finished capital rollout looks like.
The same thing explains the group’s community investment figure, which moved from USD 570,515 in FY2023/24 to USD 349,359 in FY2024/25. Educate absorbed USD 442,730 of the prior year’s total—78%. When a smartboard rollout finishes, the money follows—reading that 39% movement as a retreat from community investment would be a mistake. ESGNexus notes this is our inference rather than a Brandix statement: the FY2024/25 report gives no pillar-level spending split and does not comment on the change.
The recurring commitments continued through the year. School-essentials packs reached 21,989 children from pre-school to senior school. Educational scholarships went to 126 students and university scholarships to 8, adding to the hundreds Brandix reports having funded since 2007.
Manusath Champion: Putting a System Behind Goodwill
FY2024/25 was the year Brandix built infrastructure around employee volunteering. The Manusath Champion scheme was rolled out with a digital platform, a points and rating system, and a first recognition event, where 153 volunteers were recognised across four initiatives. More than 2,300 employees took part in volunteer activities during the year, contributing 4,853 hours in total. Separately, 46 facility-led community health projects reached over 12,000 people, run by plant-level teams who identified the need themselves.
The comparable figures for FY2023/24 were 3,482 employees and 7,875 hours, recorded under an informal mechanism. A tracked scheme counting fewer hours than an untracked one is not necessarily less effort — it is at least as likely to be a stricter count. What the platform buys Brandix is a number it can stand behind and a baseline to improve against, which is the harder and more useful thing to have.
Seven Forums, and the Number That Comes Out of Them
Under the Engage pillar, Brandix launched Social Sustainability Forums during the year as a formal channel between its facilities and the people living around them. Seven were held, with roughly 210 participants: Government Agents and District Secretariat officers, provincial council members, Grama Niladhari, area police officers, medical officers of health, public health inspectors, district base hospital officers, zonal education offices, district labour officers, BOI zone representatives, school heads, and informal bodies including three-wheel drivers, women’s and traders’ associations. Each operating location maintains a WhatsApp group, and requests are held in a master tracker.
Out of that machinery comes the disclosure that sets this report apart from almost everything else published in the market. During FY2024/25, Brandix responded to 91 community requests and resolved 26% of community concerns or requests.
A beneficiary count measures what a company chose to do. A resolution rate measures what the community asked it for. Publishing the second is a considerably harder thing to do than publishing the first, because it is the number that can be held against you. Twenty-six per cent is a first-year baseline with nothing yet to compare it to — and it is 26 percentage points more than any listed Sri Lankan peer currently discloses.
How to Read These Numbers
Three notes for anyone setting these figures alongside another company’s. None of them undercuts the work. They are the difference between a company that reports enough detail to be questioned and one that reports too little to be.
- Model Villages is a catchment measure, as the FY2023/24 definition quoted above makes clear. It counts a surrounding population within a 10-15 km radius rather than a list of households, and at 357,574 of 400,815 beneficiaries, it now carries 89% of the pillar total. That makes the reach figure a different unit from a headcount-based number, and the FY2024/25 report does not repeat the definition.
- The Educate headline of 21,989 is a count of school-essentials packs rather than of students. The summary page prints the figure as both the project count and the student count; page 129 resolves it.
- All seven forums were held in Sri Lanka, against a group footprint of 30 facilities across three countries. GRI 413-1 asks for the percentage of operations with implemented local community engagement, impact assessments and development programmes. Brandix maps the disclosure to its community chapter and gives a narrative in place of that percentage, describing the forums as a pilot to be extended.
What We Will Track Next
ESGNexus will watch three things in Brandix’s FY2025/26 report: whether the pillar-level investment split returns alongside the beneficiary counts, whether the community forums extend to the India and Bangladesh operations, and which way the 26% resolution rate moves. We will put the same questions to the listed apparel and textile groups now under the SLFRS S1 and S2 mandate, building on our disclosure profile of Teejay Lanka PLC—beginning with whether any of them can produce a resolution rate at all. On the evidence, the company, under no obligation to report anything, is setting the benchmark for the companies that are.
Sources & Further Reading
Brandix Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, “ESG Report 2024/25”, 31 August 2025 — brandix.com
Brandix Apparel (Pvt) Ltd, “ESG Report 2023/24” — brandix.com
Ernst & Young, “Independent Assurance Report” in Brandix ESG Report 2024/25, pp.145-146 — brandix.com
CA Sri Lanka, “Sustainability Disclosure Standards: SLFRS S1 and SLFRS S2 implementation roadmap” — casrilanka.com
Global Reporting Initiative, “GRI 413: Local Communities 2016” — globalreporting.org
ESGNexus, “Teejay Lanka PLC: Apparel & Textile Sustainability Profile”, 28 August 2026 — esgnexus.lk
ESGNexus, “Revised ESRS: What EU Cuts Mean for SL Exporters”, 2 August 2026 — esgnexus.lk
| About ESGNexus
ESGNexus is Sri Lanka’s independent platform for ESG, CSR, and sustainability intelligence. We track company-level ESG performance, regulatory developments, and sustainability data across Sri Lanka’s listed companies, large unlisted corporates, and state-owned enterprises. All editorial content is independently produced. Sponsored content is clearly labelled. |
Data disclaimer: Information in this article is sourced from publicly available documents. ESGNexus does not independently verify company disclosures. Errors and omissions excepted.