SUSTAINABILITY CONFAB

THE Director of the sub-Saharan Africa region of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants  (ACCA), Mr Jamil Ampomah, has called on companies particularly those in the extractive  and  manufacturing sectors to develop and publish strategies setting out their sustainability roadmaps.

That, he said should include a full disclosure of the cost of the impact their activities have on the environment in which they operate and their social responsibility to the communities they operate in.

Mr  Ampomah made the call in Accra on Tuesday at a day’s  sustainability  conference held  under the theme: “Accounting  for sustainability” and organized by ACCA Ghana with support from the Ghana sustainability Initiative  (GSI) a Non-governmental Organisation (NGO).

The conference which brought together middle  to top level executives of corporate Ghana including  academic, was meant to explore into detail the concept of sustainability and the benefits of sustainability reporting in Ghana.

Mr Amponsah said part of the sustainability  strategy should include a commitment to report how well or badly an organization is performing across the social economic and environmental dimensions as well as sustainability –related risks and opportunities.

“We believe that with the profit and loss rep[ort, there is a strong business care to be made for producing sustainability report which  looks at the  impact your activities has on the environment and communities in which you  operate” he said.

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility, the ACCA’s sub-Saharan Africa Director  noted, have now become an integral  parts of business values and strategy, rather than as an isolated function within a company.

Earlier, the  Okyehene, Osagyefor Amotia Ofori Panin, in his keynote address, regretted that Africa which was endowed with most of the world’s wealth still lags behind development and continue to wallow in poverty, diseases, civil wars and bad governance.

He said sustainability was no longer a part of our culture as our uncontrolled activities continues to impact negatively on the environment such as pollution of water bodies as a result of mining and deforestation.

Globalization, he said brought with it opportunities but  Africa, where 40  per cent of deaths are environmentally-related, we have refused o widen the circle of opportunities but widened the circle of poverty.

The Okyehene said of Ghana was to move forward with its development agenda, the was the need for governance to be more decentralized to put power in the hands of the mass of our population in the rural areas.

“A country can prosper on what it has but what it can do with what it has, “he said.

Other speakers at the conference included Mr Joseph Winful, Senior Partner,  KPMG Ghana, Professor Robert Hinson, Head of Marketing and Customer Management Department, University of Ghana Business School and Kweku Bedu-Addo, Chief Executive Officer  (CEO) Standard Chartered Bank Ghana Limited.

Nana Owusu-Afari, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Afariwa  Group of Companies, chaired the function.