Sasini Plc has released its 2024 Sustainability Report at a time when the country has unveiled its roadmap for mandatory sustainability disclosures in line with the new global financial standards, IFRS S1 and S2.
The Group’s Managing Director, Martin Ochieng’, speaks to the Business Daily on the company’s plans around harnessing carbon credits in view of the newly launched National Carbon Registry, solarising the business operations and continental mergers and acquisitions to scale the business to a continental footprint.
Whereas Sasini Plc has been releasing Sustainability Reports for a decade now, this is the first that is being released at a time when Kenya has a roadmap towards mandatory integrated reporting, in line with IFRS S1 and S2 which are designed to mainstream and standardise ESG reporting across the globe. How has this impacted your Sustainability Report?
Frankly it is not entirely new to us as a company. Sasini Plc’s sustainability reporting has so far been guided by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and we have always used GRI13 which is specific to agribusinesses.
Still on a standardised reporting perspective, we have also been aligning our reporting with Science Based Targets Initiatives and all this has enabled us to be very focused in our sustainability reporting and also allowed us to have comparability from a global reporting perspective.
The S1 and S2 roadmap in Kenya which targets mandatory disclosures starting 2027/28 will now help us to standardise locally because first of all, entities will not be able to report on matters that are not audited, so it cleans up for green washing. So, we are looking forward to have much better sustainability reporting locally.
Sasini Plc is one company that has been very aggressive on solarisation and the wider greening of its energy consumption. What does this mean for your company’s bottom-line from a savings standpoint and just how much would you like to scale this?
Solarisation for us has been two-fold. The first is that it is part of our commitment to the green transition as we free the grid for use by others, who may encounter challenges in taking up greener solutions even though Kenya’s grid is more than 90.0 percent green to start with.
The second was to move to a better and more reliable source of power for our operations especially given the cost management and efficiencies it was allowing us. When we commissioned it in 2023 it was still very expensive.
The phase of the project we have now done is the 1.3Mw solar power generation station in our tea business accounts for about 30.0 percent of our requirement.
There’s a second phase that we are now working on which entails storage of solar power because currently we just capture it and use during the day. So, we will now be able to store it and use when there will be no power from the grid.
This will allow us to extend solarisation to the coffee, macadamia and avocado businesses with the aim being that by 2026, 30.0 percent of the entire organisation’s energy needs will be meet through solar.
Considering the vast tea, coffee, avocado and macadamia estates the company has, plus the trees it is planting, has the harnessing of an opportunity through carbon credits ever topped your thinking as management? Do you ever consider deploying this in tapping into sustainability linked financing?
We started a very deliberate journey around carbon sequestration in 2019 and it was because we knew that through the crops that we grow and trees that we plant, our sequestration efforts when measured would be huge and we might end up in a position where we are positive and therefore have carbon credits and potentially could sell them.
But to be clear, we have never done this for commercial gain. We have in excess of 4.5 million seeds planted across our four crops (tea, coffee, macadamia and avocado) and another 1.5 million trees planted so far.
We have started measuring the company’s carbon sequestration and what we are seeing is really encouraging.
We didn’t capture that in this Sustainability Report because we don’t have a full year perspective of the measurements, yet. In the next report, however, this will be reported and we will look at that and what opportunities it presents. What is important at this point is that we are tracking every emission.
Sasini Plc has indicated that it is scouting across the continent for strategic acquisitions and/or joint ventures to propel its business to a continental footprint. How far are you with this plan for inorganic growth and how soon can we expect to see a deal being consummated?
Our mission is to be the biggest agricultural business in the continent and part of this growth will be expanding our geography beyond Kenya, because currently all our four crops are grown here in Kenya. So, we are looking for opportunities as far as West and Southern Africa. We have already looked at some opportunities.
We have had three very good opportunities on the table and recently said bye to one because there was disconnect at some stage on values. We came very close to closing one in our tea business last year. Currently there are a couple on the table and we expect that in the next one year
