Sustainability Report 2016

Safaricom Sustainability Report 2016

ETHICS AND VALUES

Underpinning governance and risk management are our ethics and values, which are the principles and standards that

guide our behaviour as employees and individuals. We use an independent ethics perception survey and preventative

measures like our ongoing ethics awareness and staff anti-corruption training programmes to monitor and manage the

ethics within Safaricom.

While we acknowledge that there is still much to be done,

we believe that we have been making good progress

in terms of enhancing the ‘ethical climate’ within the

company. It certainly appears that staff are increasingly

aware of ethical issues and that management are handling

these issues well.

Ethics awareness sessions

We continued to conduct regular ethics awareness sessions

with staff during the year. The focus of the sessions was on

addressing the concerns that were revealed by the ethics

perception survey conducted in January-February 2015. The

survey is an independent assessment of the opinions of our

internal and external stakeholders conducted by the Ethics

Institute of South Africa every two years.

One of the ethical risks identified by the survey is an

obsessive focus on KPIs among employees and the danger

of this breeding a culture within the company of ‘the end

justifying the means’ — where the only thing that matters is

achieving the target and not the process used to achieve

the number. We are continuing to explore ways in which

ethical impacts can be measured as part of performance

against targets.

The survey also identified sexual harassment as another

potential mid-level risk. During FY16 three sexual harassment

cases were reported (FY15: 2 cases). During the year we

refined our sexual misconduct policy, the policy outlines

how to identify sexual misconduct, empower staff to stand

up against it or call it out and offers increased reporting

channels. We also provided improved training to our

Ethics Champions to better identify, handle and report

such sensitive cases. Our expectation is that the drive in

awareness and engagement throughout the company will

result in changed behaviour.

‘I do the right thing’ campaign

This year, we shifted our focus on promoting ethics rather

than highlighting fraud. Our awareness theme for the year

was the ‘I do the right thing’ campaign, which encouraged

employees to become cognisant of their own ethical

values and to take personal ownership and responsibility for

these.

It is no secret that corruption

is rampant in Kenya, with

reports suggesting that as

many as one in three Kenyan

companies has paid a bribe

to win a contract and the

country is ranked 139

out of

the 168 countries listed in the

Transparency International

2015 corruption index.

Employees gather to listen to a panel of experts during the ethics week town

hall launch of the ‘I do the right thing’ campaign. Speakers included the head

of Transparency and Anticorruption Africa at the UN Global Compact, Olajobi

Makinwa, the MD of Vivo Energy, Polycarp Igathe, Ken Njiru of the Uungwana

Initiative, and Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore.