Safaricom Adds Double Materiality to Sustainability Report

In Short

Safaricom says its upcoming 15th Sustainable Business Report will add double materiality and move to a new method for measuring its impact.

What Happened

Safaricom briefed journalists ahead of the public launch of its 15th Sustainable Business Report. The company said it will measure its impact with a new method and report how sustainability issues affect its own finances.

The report adds “double materiality”, which Safaricom described as weighing both sides of sustainability issues. One side is how issues affect Safaricom as a business. The other side is how Safaricom affects other people and organisations.

Safaricom is also replacing its “True Value” method with the “Value Balancing Alliance” method. Senior manager Samson Kanae said Safaricom used the True Value method with KPMG for about 10 years, starting in 2015, to quantify its impact. He said the company is moving to the Value Balancing Alliance method, which companies in pharmaceuticals and technology in Europe use. Kanae said the metrics stay close to the old ones, but “you will see a lot of transparency.”

Kanae said the change will let Safaricom benchmark against other firms and explain how it reaches each figure. He said the report covers dealer and agency networks, corporate social investment, and capital and operating spending.

Safaricom also flagged a disclosure requirement coming up in Kenya. Kenyan public interest entities, including NSE listed companies, must publish IFRS S1 and S2 disclosures for accounting periods beginning on or after January 1, 2027.

Why It Matters

Double materiality pushes Safaricom to report sustainability in a way that connects to financial performance, not just activities and donations.

Switching measurement methods could make Safaricom’s impact figures easier to compare with other companies, and easier for readers to trace back to the underlying calculations.

The IFRS S1 and S2 requirement raises the bar for sustainability reporting for Kenyan public interest entities, and Safaricom is positioning its reporting approach ahead of that shift.