Rules, reality and the road to a continent‑wide framework
There is a scene that plays out repeatedly across the boardrooms of African financial institutions: a sustainability report drafted to satisfy a foreign development lender sits on one side of the table, while on the other side lies a domestic regulatory framework that makes no mention of it whatsoever. The two documents are rarely aligned with each other. This gap between what international capital requires and what local law demands is perhaps the defining characteristic of the current ESG landscape across the African continent.
That tension is not a failing unique to any one jurisdiction. It is, as Dentons’ Africa Financial Services Sector Group found when consulting colleagues across nine markets (namely Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon) a structural feature of the continent’s financial sector at this particular moment in its development.
The picture that emerges from those consultations is neither one of uniform backwardness nor of impending transformation. It is more complicated, and in some ways more interesting, than either of those narratives would suggest…
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Source: dentons.com
