The “Hand in Hand into the Future” worldwide appeal was launched by the DBT Group at the beginning of the year to raise money for the region.

Employees at the 15 participating DBT sites in Australia, France, Germany, Poland, Britain, USA, and South Africa donated a total of EUR16,864. DBT corporate contributed the rest.

“I am very happy with the result of our multi-week appeal. It once again shows the strong sense of community of our 3000 employees. We can achieve great things together – although of course, the focus of the campaign was humanitarian rather than our core business,” said Hermann Oecking, chief human resources officer at DBT.

The money will be donated by DBT subsidiaries to local national aid organizations to help finance long-term reconstruction projects in the crisis regions. EUR30,000 will go to the German Kindernothilfe (Emergency Children’s Aid), for example, to help with the reconstruction of 15 child-care centers and five centers for school children in the tsunami-devastated villages of Nagapattinam in southern India.

“We intentionally made our donations to reconstruction projects that primarily benefit children in the crisis region,” Oecking said, “because the destruction of the entire infrastructure hits children hardest. We want to support long-term projects that offer people a future. And children are the future.”