Wilderness Holdings’ annual Integrated Report has won three of the accolades at this year’s PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)/Business Botswana Best Published Corporate Report and Accounts Awards: Best Overall Report, Best Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme and Best Report in the Commerce and Industry category.
Said Derek de la Harpe, Commercial Director and Chief Sustainability Officer, Wilderness Holdings, “This is a tremendous milestone for us as a business. Much time and investment goes into our integrated reporting and the underlying sustainability management and monitoring systems. These are integral to our business but the reports are one of the most obvious manifestations and are a platform we rely on to communicate our governance and best practice with our shareholders and other stakeholders. Even beyond the requirements of being a BSE-listed company, we want to ensure a degree of transparency as well as engagement that is unrivalled. It goes beyond simply the design – though great effort is of course made here – but also ensuring the content of both our Integrated Annual Report and our Sustainability Report are of the greatest caliber”.
The PwC/Business Botswana Awards strive to ensure that published financial statements comply with international accounting standards and statutory disclosure requirements. The platform works to promote Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and to foster acceptance and observance of generally accepted accounting principles in Botswana. The Awards further encourage Botswana’s business community to improve the standard of financial reporting through benchmarking and adoption of best practice.
This is the sixth year Wilderness has been acknowledged in the Awards, adding to the company’s growing number of accolades. As a pioneering sustainable and authentic ecotourism company, Wilderness continues to enhance the standard of reporting excellence through a unique and sustainable business model based on the 4Cs of Commerce, Community, Culture and Conservation.
“By successfully integrating our financial and 4Cs sustainability framework into one coherent report, we have demonstrated that each aspect of our business is as important as the other”, continued de la Harpe. “Our company has to do well in order to effect change but it has also demonstrated that, by making a difference, we can also create value for our shareholders”.
For more information on Wilderness, read the FY17 Sustainability Report or the Group’s FY17 Annual Integrated Report for more detail.
