TRAINING and Advisory Services (TAS) managing director Webster Sigauke has said data collection for environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting remains a challenge as most companies cannot track their sustainability efforts.
At the beginning of the year, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange mandated that all listed entities on the bourse and the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange should include ESG reporting in their financial results.
However, there is still a slow uptake in firms fully revealing their sustainability initiatives.
TAS provides technical advisory services to private and public entities.
“The biggest issue that we have at the moment is taking sustainability as a reporting issue. So, what it means is it’s not embedded in our practices, of which, data collection is much more to do with the practice happening and we document those practices. By the time that we get to the reporting period, we compile everything,” Sigauke told Newsday Business. “So, when it’s taken as a reporting issue, that’s when we get to the end and then we start asking each other, what did we do during the year? So, for me, data collection first has to start from our setting up of sustainable processes within organisations.”
He emphasised the need for companies to adopt sustainability thinking to better track ESG — related activities.
“So, what are the activities related to sustainability, which happen at a board level? What it means now is we set up the data which will be expected because the board will then say, our key performance areas on sustainability are 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . and will be contained within our strategy. So, what it means now is we operationalise the strategy,” Sigauke said.
“We need to put processes now which track what we are doing, that’s how the data collection starts to happen.
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“Without the sustainable thinking, data collection will always be an issue, because there are no processes which have been put in place which allow the operationalisation and the documentation of the activities which are being done.”
He added the biggest threat in the country was economic challenges such as hyperinflation which posed threats to sustainability development, creating hardships that hindered progress.
“So, to a certain extent, it then brings a lot of entities to start thinking about short-term survival, getting to survive or not. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we have,” Sigauke said.
“For it not to be a tick-box exercise, but rather do it, we need to get out of that short-term thinking."
