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Impact Africa Consulting Limited

FAQ's

We are boutique sustainability consultancy company headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with global sustainability experience in Africa having handle projects and clients in over 30 countries in Africa.

We offer a broad range of services as listed below;

  • Sustainability reporting and assurance: From climate change to human rights issues, there is increasing urgency in company boardrooms to address the complex sustainability challenges facing the world.
  • Impact assessment (Environmental Social Impact Assessment, Social Return On Investment): New and existing projects are under increasing scrutiny with respect to their potential impacts on natural and human environments and subject to rigorous assessment to understand and mitigate these impacts.
  • Training and capacity building: IACL has an established history of working with organizations in the areas of skills development, knowledge transfer, and capacity building. Our interactive training program combines business priorities, foundational sustainability concepts, industry “toolkits,” and practical case studies to develop and enhance sustainability skills, knowledge, and awareness among generalists, practitioners, and corporate leaders.
  • Supply chain Resilience and Sustainability: We work with companies’ supply chain, sourcing, and procurement functions to develop supply chains that deliver business value and are inclusive, resilient, and transparent, creating long-term benefit for all involved stakeholders.
  • Corporate Sustainability & Climate Action Development: From climate change to human rights issues, there is increasing urgency in company boardrooms to address the complex sustainability challenges facing the world.
  • Climate Risks and Opportunities Evaluation & Management: We accelerate your climate risks and opportunity journey through our deep understanding of the implications of the climate emergency and climate economy for the private sector including Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
  • Strategy, Policy and Management Systems: Working out how best to integrate ESG into day-to-day business activities, investment processes and decision making can often be challenging. We have worked with Financial Institutions, Funds and Investee Companies to develop and implement strategies, policies and systems that add value, improve operational performance and meet internationally accepted standards.
  • Strategic Communications & Stakeholder Engagement: Investors, customers, governments, communities, nongovernmental organizations, and employees all have different expectations, and organizations - both in the public and private sector - must proactively manage them all.
  • Product Measurement and Assessment: From operations to products, business and enterprise alike have an impact to the environment and climate. We will provide you with bespoke services to measure and assess your product environmental impact via Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and also calculate the environmental footprint assessment.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Together, these three aspects make up a framework to evaluate issues pertaining to a company’s long-term health and prosperity. For many investors, it’s not enough to check off two boxes and leave one totally blank. They’re searching for thoughtful, forward-looking policies and programs in all three of these areas.

Environmental
What kind of impact is your company having on the environment?
This can encompass issues of carbon emissions, runoff, disposal procedure, pollution of all kinds, resource efficiency, biodiversity, and history with environmental regulatory bodies.
If your company is falling short in terms of environmental responsibility, well investors are only getting more interested. On the other hand, excellent environmental stewardship can show commitment and capability to follow through.

Social
What kind of relationships does your company have with the people in its ecosystem?
This covers how your company manages relationships with its employees, customers, suppliers, partners and communities.
Here’s where your employee treatment, benefits, pay, and diversity will be evaluated along with your company values and how they have (or haven’t) been put into practice. Matters of human rights, sourcing, customer service, and customer protection will also factor into this criterion, as well as the social impact that your operations have left on the surrounding area.

Governance
How does the board of directors run the company?
This aspect involves examining the executive governance of the company. Investors will evaluate stakeholder incentives, executive compensation, bonuses, prioritized metrics of success, matters of corruption, conflicts of interest, levels of transparency, and the hierarchy of governance.

Sustainability embeds value generation into business strategy for the long-term benefit of all stakeholders. ​​An integrated sustainability strategy reinforces that environmental, social and other impacts are incorporated into important business and operational decisions.

There are many reasons why organizations do it and have done it for many years now. For us, two of these reasons are big enough on their own to justify the time and resources dedicated to this:

Because it has been proven in many studies that having a solid ESG strategy makes organizations more resilient because they recognize risks and opportunities that otherwise could have been lost.

Because investors are moving in this direction (there are more than 3,300 signatories of the UN’s PRIs and growing each year) and thus they will require more disclosure and better ESG strategies from the companies or platforms in which they invest.

Identify a leader to champion the creation and execution of your ESG strategy. The ESG champion should have enough authority across the organization to gather data, engage cross-functional teams, and influence strategy. You’ll want stakeholders involved from your key internal services—finance, procurement, legal, human resources, DEI, IT, facilities, and risk management—as well as operational functions and those who support the board. Bring in members of the management team who understand strategy, the bigger picture, and are excited to invest in a change management initiative.

Before beginning an ESG plan, conduct a readiness assessment. If you build an ESG strategy that isn’t suitably supported, there are potential risks to your organization’s reputation and strategy effectiveness.

The readiness assessment should identify your desired state and whether you have the organizational resources, skills, data, and capacity to get there; if not, what gaps exist, and what resources may you need to address those gaps?
Each organization’s capacity, culture, and skills will vary, but your ESG committee can help identify existing resources across the organization. If gaps remain, part of your ESG strategy can include initiatives to address them.

Approach creating an ESG plan by starting with your organization’s strategic plan: Where does ESG align with your overall vision, mission, and values? Establish vision and purpose statements for your ESG initiative and develop both short-term and long-term goals that are relevant to your board, investors, stakeholders, staff, and leadership. Each goal should be supported by target outcomes and initiatives that are clearly defined and measurable, have ownership assigned, and resources dedicated or budgeted where applicable.

The most important part of your ESG strategy is deciding what and how to report your progress toward achieving outcomes. You’ll want to tell your own story and provide timely, relevant information to your stakeholders. For each outcome area, identify meaningful performance metrics.

Performance metrics will vary for each organization based on your unique operations and the outcomes you’ve established. Assess the data you have available, identify any gaps you want to fill, and ensure that the data you report is reliable and accurate.

The most important part of your ESG strategy is deciding what and how to report your progress toward achieving outcomes. You’ll want to tell your own story and provide timely, relevant information to your stakeholders. For each outcome area, identify meaningful performance metrics. Performance metrics will vary for each organization based on your unique operations and the outcomes you’ve established. Assess the data you have available, identify any gaps you want to fill, and ensure that the data you report is reliable and accurate.

Consider creating a performance dashboard to report your ESG targets and metrics. A successful ESG dashboard will be a snapshot of status and trends over time, show performance against defined targets, and encourage dialogue about progress towards goals.
Providing a regular report to your board, on a quarterly or biannual basis, will help you to monitor progress and continue to refine your goals as your ESG strategy matures.
Many organizations also develop narrative ESG reports detailing their data, efforts, outcomes, targets, and other relevant information.
ESG reports can be powerful communication tools to your staff, board, investors, the public, and other stakeholders. They demonstrate transparency and awareness that your organization’s operational and business goals are in service of your values.
There are several existing frameworks and standards that can help guide your reporting efforts, but there’s no universally accepted framework at this time. Many companies also look to CPA firms to validate the reliability of their ESG disclosures through third-party assurance.

You may already be taking actions that could qualify as ESG activities. By improving your environmental footprint or diversifying your workforce to help meet sustainability or cultural goals, your organization could have opportunities to boost cash flow and reduce tax liabilities.
Here are a few example activities:

  • Improve energy efficiency in buildings you own or operate
  • Design, develop, or improve your products, process, techniques, formulas, or software to enhance your environmental practices
  • Cultivate an inclusive workplace culture that supports career development and retention of a diverse workforce
  • Invest in solar and other renewable energy projects or affordable rental housing
  • Rehabilitate a historic building you own or operate
  • Conduct annual board self-assessments and governance best practices training
Stakeholders, including investors, lenders, customers, and employees, value transparency, accuracy, and consistency of ESG issues and related risks at levels equal to a company’s financial reporting. External assurance will give readers of your report additional confidence in the reliability of reported data and can enhance your brand and business reputation. Third party assurance can also satisfy the reporting conditions of major customers as well as identify process improvements in the measurement and reporting of ESG metrics.
The bad news first: ESG compliance is not a “steady state”. The ESG world and its requirements evolve continuously, materiality is dynamic, and companies that want to have a good ESG performance must work on this consistently. This means that thinking of ESG compliance as a check list where once you tick all the boxes you are done, is a mistake in our view and puts you on the path of being seen as a green-washer. Having said that, the good news is that Mexico is still in a stage of ESG development where what matters the most is that companies are actually working on their ESG strategy and taking it seriously. Companies that have spent more time doing this are obviously showing better results and are being recognized for it by the market, but even companies that are just starting with the intention of doing it right are being given enough leeway to get their strategy up to speed in the coming years. It will usually take 12-18 months to go through an initial cycle of deciding the focus areas (ideally through a materiality analysis), exploring each focus area, setting up KPIs and KPI goals, integrating all of this into the organization, and being able to produce your first sustainability or integrated report and answer an ESG questionnaire. It will take much more than that to really have robust data, robust processes, and robust reporting. This is expected and the main goal is to be on the right path.
This is a tricky topic, but in our experience, there are 2 things that really help: Making public commitments to ESG through transparent reporting (setting goals for your KPIs publicly, communicating your KPIs clearly, reporting consistently on what the organization is achieving and what it is not, etc.). Having a top management team who genuinely believes in ESG. There will always be non-believers of the importance of ESG everywhere, and there will definitely be people who dislike the fact that they have some additional work stemming from the ESG strategy or even that their previous work is being a bit more scrutinized with better information management systems. But when the vision of the company is aligned with this principles and positive effects are seen in the implementation of the ESG strategy, generally these people will be convinced. The message from the top must be clear, and with no hesitation. ESG matters (see our arguments in question 1), and everyone will do better if everyone aligns with the strategy
It depends on the size of your organization, on the complexity of your strategy, and on how ambitious are your goals. If you will not have a team dedicated to it though, you should at least make it very clear who has the responsibility for the different initiatives, and how their performance will be measured. For many organizations ESG is an independent business area which reports to the CEO. For others, it is part of the Finance division (reporting to the CFO, many times parallel to investor relations). For others, it is part of the Legal & Compliance division (reporting to the head of legal affairs in the company). There is no absolute best solution, each company needs to figure out what works best depending on what the ESG strategy will be all about. For public companies in particular, we recommend ESG closely coordinates with Investor Relations.