Sustainability Reporting for Responsible Business in Africa, Hispanic America and South East Asia

The Sustainability Reporting for Responsible Business  (SRRB) program is a continuation of GRI’s long-standing cooperation with the Swiss Confederation’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO). 

Building on the results achieved in the Corporate Sustainability and Reporting for Competitive Business program, the SRRB program seeks to enable a demand-driven increase in GRI sustainability reporting and quality of disclosures in Africa, Hispanic America and South East Asia. 

By strengthening strategic relationships with local companies, government agencies, stock exchanges and regulators, we aim to empower them to integrate sustainability in their policies and guidance. And by supporting companies to comply with issued guidelines and educating them on the opportunities that lie beyond compliance, we are increasing sustainable business practices and contributing to the countries’ plans to ‘build back better’ following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The overall goal of the SRRB program is for organizations to be transparent and take responsibility for their impacts to advance sustainable development. 

More specifically, the program aims to: 

• Enhance reporters’ capacity for sustainability reporting; 
• Create and improve the environment for transparency and disclosure through sustainability reporting; 
• Increase the use of corporate sustainability disclosure data by stakeholders. 

The program’s focus is to improve and integrate sustainability reporting through a regionally contextualized and market-driven approach whilst providing support to companies to increase the quality and demand for sustainability data. By engaging with regulators, procurement professionals, stock exchanges and policymakers, the SRRB program seeks to set the right conditions for sustainability disclosure requirements to be anchored in public and private policies. 

Another objective is to better equip data users, such as the investor community and the media, to ask for improved disclosure from companies and use that information for decision-making. The program also empowers local partners to provide continuous support to companies with their sustainability reporting independently from GRI. 

The SRRB program runs from April 2021 to December 2024. Some of the results and resources produced so far are listed below:

All regions

• The program supports the GRI Academy scholarship in all three target regions.

Results from Africa:

• GRI and Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) hosted a roundtable on ESG reporting targeted at listed companies, regulatory authorities, brokers, and other relevant market regulators.
• GRI organized an online event on the Sustainability Reporting Landscape to help reporting companies assess the practical implications for corporate disclosure.
• Together with Batseta - Council of Retirement Funds for South Africa, we organized an event for investors, companies and market regulators interested in understanding ESG data required to make sound and sustainable investment decisions.

Results from Hispanic America:

• Development of sustainability reporting guidance for industry associations (in Spanish)
• Creation and launch of the LatAm Supply Chain Network, aimed at promoting sustainable practices within the supply chain of key institutions.
• In September 2021 GRI and the International Center for Social Responsibility and Sustainability (Centro RS) organized the third Competitive and Sustainable Supply Chain Summit
• Creation of the Responsible Journalists Network in Peru, aimed at sensitizing, training, and providing a list of trustworthy sources for journalists’ research.

Results from South-East Asia:

• Development of the Sustainability Reporting Toolkit for the Agricultural Sector in collaboration with PISAgro- the Partnership for Indonesia Sustainable Agriculture (in Indonesian).
• Initiation of a series of online Sustainable Finance workshops with the Indonesia Capital Market Lecturers Association (IDPMI), the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia.
• Supported BAPPENAS (Ministry of National Development Planning of Indonesia) in collecting private sector input on the SDG progress for the Voluntary National Review (VNR), which was presented at the UN High Level Political Forum – read more here.
• Delivered four workshops on SDGs and Impact Reporting in Thailand and Indonesia, with support from stock exchanges.
• Established the Philippine Consortium on Sustainable Finance, in partnership with WWF Philippines, aimed at building knowledge and capacity of local banks on sustainable finance and assisting them in complying with the requirements of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP, Central Bank of the Republic of the Philippines).

Resources (available for download in the 'Related documents' section below)

• Guía para elaborar reportes de sostenibilidad gremiales - 2021