True recovery is 'building back better' for a sustainable future

On Wednesday this week we launched our 10th Sustainable Business Report titled Standing Together; Going Beyond. The report is a record on our commitment to empower individuals, communities and businesses realise their dreams by providing transformational products and services.

We believe that for us to achieve our vision which is to be a purpose-led Technology Company by 2025, it is imperative that we leverage our platforms and technology to explore new areas of growth guided by the Sustainable Development Goals and through sustainable partnerships.

The sustainability report gives a comprehensive view of where we are in our journey towards this commitment. The Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced our belief that we cannot succeed in isolation and that our future is interconnected with each other. It has altered the environment for all businesses and ours was no exception.

We know that the pandemic is far from over and we remain committed to supporting our stakeholders navigate through this period and recover. However, for the recovery to be durable and resilient, a return to business as usual and environmentally destructive investment activities must be avoided.

If unchecked, global environmental emergencies such as climate change could cause social and economic damages far greater than those caused by Covid-19.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, captured it well when he told the UN General Assembly recently that “with humanity on the edge of an abyss and moving in the wrong direction, the world must wake up”.

That is why we believe that we should design the collective recovery around “building back better” which means doing more than getting economies and livelihoods quickly back on their feet. Recovery policies need to trigger investment and behavioural changes that will reduce the likelihood of future shocks and increase society’s resilience to them when they do occur.

There is no doubt that the road to recovery will be long and tedious, but business such as ours can help by investing in sustainable solutions to the most pressing societal needs.

As we get to the last quarter of 2021, the clock is ticking louder than ever before and it’s a race against time if we are to achieve the SDGs by 2030. While progress has been made, we are not advancing at the speed or scale required. The private sector will have a critical role to play in determining whether the SDGs are realised by 2030, and we therefore need to take stock of our efforts and identify areas where we are best equipped to drive real action and impact.

Our industry contributes mainly to SDG 9 - Industry Innovation and Infrastructure, both as a provider of critical infrastructure and as a catalyst for other sectors through provision of connectivity solutions and platforms which other businesses can leverage to scale their products and services.

We will continue to play our role in providing solutions to our society’s most pressing challenges as well as supporting other businesses, especially small and medium enterprises thrive through connectivity and financial services solutions.

Going forward we will endeavour to play a key role in driving healthcare and education inclusion as well as enabling smallholder farmers to become more commercially sustainable. We remain focused on our sustainability agenda covering key issues such as addressing our impact on the climate and building an inclusive business that not only meets the needs of our customers, but also reflects the diverse nature of our society.

We will continue to integrate our nine material SDGs, directly linked to our business growth strategy and which have enabled us to become a more sustainable company and create meaningful impact on communities that we serve.

Through the Sustainable Future Series, which we launched last year, we look forward to convening business leaders to discuss and identify solutions for the various sustainability challenges facing our society. I remain optimistic regarding the future with projections showing strong signs of economic recovery as the Government continues to source and provide vaccines to Kenyans which will allow for easing of restriction measures.

I urge other business leaders, both large and small, to join us in committing to play a role in bringing sustainability to the forefront and achieving the SDGs because; together we can be stronger; together we can achieve more; and together we can Go Beyond.