INTERVIEW WITH OUR LATE CEO

It has been a demanding year for Safaricom. In this wide-ranging interview Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom, discusses the progress the company has made towards its sustainability commitments and offers his perspective on the important link between shared value thinking, reducing inequalities and commercial sustainability. This interview was conducted in May 2019 and is published posthumously.

You have spoken about the importance of Shared Value thinking as a way of guiding sustainable business activity. How do you define Shared Value and why do you consider it such an important guiding concept?

From a sustainability perspective, “Shared Value” is an established and important concept. It highlights why sustainable business solutions are more powerful and lasting than extractive or exploitative business practices. As its name implies, the concept emphasises how business, its stakeholders and value chains can come together and deliver products and services in a way that creates new or additional value for everyone involved.

In any case, it is encouraging to see the idea of profit with purpose — of using sound commercial principles to create sustainable economic empowerment and prosperity — being embraced by the business community. We hosted the Africa Shared Value Summit here in Nairobi in May 2019 and it was great to see how well the private sector was represented. It was encouraging to see a large number of CEOs attend in person to drive Shared Value leadership from the top.*

The public sector cannot solve the challenges we are discussing by itself. There is so much the private sector can and needs to do; so many potential partnerships that can be created to unlock extra, sustainable value. I am working with my counterparts in the banking sector, for example, to find ways of creating new entrepreneurial opportunities that will benefit them and us and entrepreneurs.

*We have published the full text of Bob’s speech at the Shared Value Summit under the “Concluding Remarks” section

Safaricom employees began the process of including SDG-related commitments in their personal performance objectives during the year and this has been described as “a significant achievement”. Do you agree with this assessment?

Yes, it is a significant achievement, particularly since I believe we are among the forerunners in this regard. We started the SDG integration process in 2016 by embracing the SDGs as a business and integrating them into our corporate strategy. We began by asking each division within the company to map its material issues against the SDGs, and were able to identify nine out of the 17 Goals as relevant to Safaricom. Our people have now embraced the Goals as individuals and begun the process of including SDG-related commitments in their personal performance objectives. Even though we still have a fair way to go in this regard, I am satisfi ed with our progress because it takes time to establish this kind of traction and momentum at the level of the individual.

You introduced the new role of Chief Customer Officer (CCO) as part of the restructuring of the leadership during the year. Could you tell us more about the purpose of this new executive position and what you hope it will achieve?

One of the benefits of being away from the company for part of the year was that it gave me the space and time to really think about several aspects of the business, including our customers and what customer-centricity actually means.

We decided to introduce this new role to bring together the key customer-facing functions from across the business, from products, sales and marketing to customer care, and to make one person, ultimately, responsible for the customer. It also reflects our sharper focus on the customer as a person, not a segment or a function.

We have talked about being customer-focused in the past, but until we restructured the company to reflect that commitment and put the key decision making in one place, and the right place, it was really more words we said than an actual change in mindset or the way we operate.

Safaricom has committed to becoming a net zero carbonemitting company by 2050. How has this courageous pledge impacted the company?

One of the biggest challenges the world is facing today is climate change. In recognition of this, we made the bold commitment to become a net zero carbon-emitting company by 2050. Did we know how we were going to achieve this goal when we started? No. We just knew that we had to try. Has embracing this challenge given us a clearer idea of what needs to be done? Yes. Making this pledge has galvanised us and many of our initiatives can be mapped to it. It is encouraging us to be more radical and inventive and to think more creatively about our relationship with energy, together with the potential use of carbon offsets.

As a result, we are not looking simply at getting our network sites off generators and on to the national grid, but at powering them using renewable energy. We are also exploring how to consume energy more efficiently. We have started focusing in earnest on the role carbon offsets will need to play in order for us to achieve our net zero commitment as well. By the time this report is published, for instance, we expect to have announced our intention to plant a forest of one million trees as part of our carbon offset programme.

“The public sector cannot solve the challenges we are discussing by itself. There is so much the private sector can and needs to do.”

The company has set itself rigorous targets for diversity and inclusion by 2020. Are you pleased with progress to date?

Results have been mixed. In some respects, we have made decent progress. We are working hard to achieve our pledge to increase the number of differently-abled employees to five per cent of our workforce in 2021. We have also maintained our gender parity as an employer and 50 per cent of our permanent staff are female.

That said, I remain disappointed with our lack of progress in terms of achieving gender parity in senior management and executive leadership. We have committed to achieving equal gender representation in senior management by 2021, but only 34 per cent of our senior managers and 27 per cent of our executive leaders are female.

I recognise that this is a multifaceted challenge, of course, and more than simply a recruitment problem. The many roles that women are often required to play in their families and in society inevitably impact upon their careers.

We have been working hard to address this complex challenge through initiatives like our Women in Leadership and Women in Technology programmes, but the fact remains that we need to intensify our efforts if we are to achieve the 2021 target.

Our Women in Business initiative has started to show results and women-owned companies participated in a third of the contracts we put out to tender this year, up from just 16 per cent in 2017. We still have much to do to achieve our target of ensuring that women-owned companies account for at least ten per cent of our total procurement spend by 2020, but I am satisfied that we continue to shift the needle in the right direction in that regard.

You have suggested that individual ethics need to drive the fight against corruption in the long term. Could you explain what you mean by this?

We need to start moving the conversation from straightforward corruption and broaden it to consider ethical behaviour in general. Obviously, corrupt acts should continue to be pursued, exposed and punished as a top priority, but I believe that the long-term solution is to start thinking about what it means to conduct ourselves as individuals in an ethical manner, and what the personal benefits of doing so might be.

This approach makes sense because corruption begins with a single individual and his or her personal choices. So, let us start addressing this fact by becoming more conscious of the impact our choices and actions have on ourselves, each other and society in general, not just on Safaricom.

This perspective also moves the conversation on to a more sophisticated and potentially useful level. It begins to inform how we address issues like customer privacy and concerns regarding customer data collection and use, for example, which are sensitive areas that companies like ours are going to have to navigate carefully in the near future.

Accordingly, my hope is that awareness of the impact and importance of individual ethical behaviour will become central to the way the company thinks about corruption and ethics over the next few years.

“The second biggest challenge facing the world is inequality. It is on the rise globally… Inequality weakens the socio-economic fabric of society.”

Why is addressing income inequality such an important ambition for you?

The second biggest challenge facing the world is inequality. It is on the rise globally. We can see the reality and negative consequences of this all around us in Kenya. Inequality weakens the socio-economic fabric of society. Income inequality has been linked to lower levels of education, poorer public health, higher rates of crime and lower GDP growth rates. The impact of inequality is a really important issue for us because it is clear that the ongoing success of a company is directly linked to the success of the society within which it operates.

Business has a vested interest in creating inclusive growth, as well as an important role to play. If you help your consumer base gain access to more opportunity and success through becoming more educated, healthier and productive, it is obvious that your business will thrive. In an ideal scenario, the public sector provides the enabling environment, the private sector delivers opportunities, and civil society deepens the links into the community and ensures accountability.

Safaricom is a top collector of e-waste in the Kenyan private sector. Why do you argue that this is not enough?

I am proud of the fact that Safaricom is the one of the largest private-sector collectors of e-waste in Kenya. We collected another 217 tonnes during the year and have collected over a thousand tonnes since 2015. We have begun collecting other recyclable and compostable waste as well. I maintain that this is not enough though, because we need to stop the waste being created in the fi rst place. In that regard, I am pleased that we have committed ourselves to eliminating all single-use plastic at our facilities, along with minimising the amount of plastic used in our retail packaging and SIM cards.

I am pleased with the start we have made, but we need to get other companies and organisations to follow suit. My understanding is that it is diffi cult to recycle effi ciently the comparatively small amounts of e-waste and plastic that are being collected at present. As a society, we urgently need to collect more. It is the kind of challenge to which we need to apply Shared Value thinking. How can we scale up our efforts and incentivise large numbers of socioeconomically challenged Kenyans to collect waste for recycling, for instance?

You have suggested that sustainability at Safaricom is “bigger than the CEO”. What do you mean by that?

Exactly that. I am delighted at how the team here at Safaricom continued to drive the sustainability agenda during my absence this year. It is a measure of how far we have come in terms of embedding such ideas institutionally within the company. The importance of being a sustainability-led business appears to have been embraced enthusiastically by our people and this fills me with confidence and optimism.

Yet we need others to join with us. We cannot succeed alone. The world appears to be becoming more divided and unequal rather than less. Our country and continent face pressing challenges that can only be solved if we all work together. Business has a vital role to play — perhaps a more important role than any other player in the theatre — and the time to unite to address the challenge of reducing inequalities is now.