Our sustainability reporting focuses on activities and risks that are both of material importance to our business and of interest to our stakeholders. In this appendix to the report, we provide an outline of the methodology we use to determine the most important business and socio-economic matters that are central to our approach. We also provide a summary of the scope of our reporting, together with an Assurance Statement from Deloitte & Touche accountants and a link to our index of conformance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 Guidelines

Purpose

Thank you for reading the fifth annual sustainability report of Safaricom Limited. The purpose of this report is to document the key sustainability challenges the company faced during the reporting period and to discuss the many ways in which the organisation is responding. The most material economic, environmental and social impacts and opportunities of our business are considered and the main ways in which our technological footprint is contributing to transforming lives and sustainable living throughout Kenya is explored.

Scope

This report covers our fiscal year of 01 April 2015 to 31 March 2016. It builds on our last sustainability report for the year ending 31 March 2015. The scope of this report encompasses the operations of Safaricom and there have been no significant changes in the size, location, structure or ownership of our organisation or our supply chain during the reporting period.

This sustainability report forms part of our annual reporting suite and, throughout this report, we have made reference to information contained within the Safaricom Annual Report, the Annual Report of the Safaricom Foundation and information that is available on the Safaricom website. In most instances, this supplementary information is available online.

Determining our material matters

There has been little substantive change to our material matters since these were determined and prioritised during a series of robust internal workshops in FY14. The workshops were used to discuss and review our sustainability context, stakeholder issues, and the associated risks and opportunities for Safaricom. Various internal and external stakeholder groups and individuals were engaged with during the process to understand specific concerns about our business and its impacts, particularly in relation to the environment and society.

Streamlining our reporting

Last year, we successfully streamlined and enhanced our reporting by consolidating the way in which we discuss our material matters. We organised these issues around four major dimensions that better reflect how we manage our business: our network; our technological innovation; governance, risk and regulation; and our environmental impact. The positive response to this approach has encouraged us to adopt the same structure and grouping in this report.

We do not believe that there are any major material economic, social or environmental impacts of the organisation that have been excluded from this report. For a more detailed discussion of our most material matters, please refer to page the ‘Our material matters’ section of this site.

Emissions and energy consumption reporting

Emissions

We have calculated and published our carbon footprint for the fifth time this year. Our emissions are composed of ‘scope 1’ emissions, which include the diesel consumed in our generators, the fuel used in our fleet vehicles and the fugitive emissions associated with our air-conditioning systems, ‘scope 2’ emissions, which are the indirect emissions associated with our consumption of purchased electricity, and ‘scope 3’ emissions, which include other indirect sources, such as air travel and taxi hire. We have expressed our emissions as ‘Tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’ (tCO2e), which is the standard for comparing different greenhouse gases ‘relative to one unit of CO2’.

We have calculated our carbon footprint using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (Revised edition). Our consolidation approach for calculating our emissions is operational control. The latest electricity emission factor for Kenya published by Ecometrica (emissionfactors.com) has been used. For the other energy sources, air travel and refrigerant gases; we used the 2015-16 tCO2e Emission Factors from the UK Governmental Departments for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Energy consumption

We report energy consumption in overall terms by energy source (electricity and diesel) and, specifically, by type of site (e.g. national grid, generator or renewable energy-based). We use an electronic data collection process to gather our data and, primarily, energy usage data is based on invoices from our energy suppliers. In some instances, those bills are based on estimated readings. Where data does not match our reporting period exactly (where we only have 10 months of data available, for example) we forecast this information by extrapolation. Likewise, for sites where energy invoices are unavailable, we estimate this information based on typical site consumption patterns.