Stanbic, NSSF, and PostBank win big at the 2023 FiRe Awards

Stanbic Uganda Holdings Limited floored several organisations and scooped the Gold Accolade for the Integrated Report of the Year award at the 2023 Financial Reporting Awards held at Kampala Serena Hotel last evening.

National Social Security Fund won Silver. PostBank scooped Bronze.

Organised by the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Uganda, this year’s awards were held under the theme ‘ESG: reporting as brand storytelling’.

The Committee received 100 entries for participation in the 2023 Financial Reporting (FiRe) Awards.

It emphasized integrated reporting and ESG considerations.

“The winners of the top three Awards were selected based on the extent of connectivity of information resulting in a holistic, comprehensive, and coherent annual report,” said CPA Stephen Ineget, the Committee Chairperson.

ESG is an external investment framework, or a form of metrics, that helps organizations communicate their initiatives and investors assess the organization’s performance and risk.

It has three pillars: environmental, social, and governance which assist organizations in identifying and addressing potential risks, improve decision-making, and enhance long-term value creation.

The organisers said, this year, they took note that participants embraced two emerging approaches to organizational external reporting, in which integrated reporting lies at the center of each approach; that is the Umbrella or ‘Octopus Approach and the Single Report or ‘Combined’ Approach, with the majority of the organizations applying the latter.

With this trend, we believe applying the Building Block Approach to Sustainability Reporting as recommended by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) will ease our journey to enabling enterprise value reporting for investors and other providers of financial capital as premised within the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards among others, Ineget said.

Deputy Speaker of Parliament of Uganda Thomas Tayebwa said the Awards were critical for improving the reporting standards of participating organisations which would directly translate into opportunities for the economy.

He congratulated all the winners and urged non-participants for this year to consider taking part in next year’s Awards.