Engaging stakeholders

ASIAFRICA is an impartial facilitator for dialogue between stakeholders from the public and the private sector who are interested in creating developing accountable systems as well as sustainable solutions to social and environment challenges.

Stakeholders are not just members of communities or non-governmental organisations. They are those individuals, groups of individuals or organisations that affect and/or could be affected by an organisation’s activities, products or services and associated performance with regard to the issues to be addressed by the engagement.

Engaging with the individuals, groups of individuals or organisations that are affected by or can affect an organisation’s activities, and responding to their concerns makes organisations perform better. Quality stakeholders engagement is expected to achieve the following objectives:

Develop accountability standards in priority categories such as education and skills development, the sustainability of extractive resources as well as in the environment and nature protection;
Allow for the pooling of resources (knowledge, people, money and technology) to solve problems and reach objectives that cannot be reached by single organisations;
Inform, educate and influence stakeholders to improve their decisions and actions that will have an impact on the organisation and on society;
Help to determine material issues for sustainability management and reporting;
Give those who have a right to be heardthe opportunity to be considered in decision making processes therefore leading to more equitable and sustainable social development by ;
Contribute to the development of trust-based and transparent stakeholder relationships.
Enable understanding of the complex operating environments, including market developments and cultural dynamics;
Enable better management of risk and reputation;
Enable learning from stakeholders, resulting in service and process improvements;

As a common process used by organisation to engage relevant stakeholders for a clear purpose to achieve accepted outcomes, stakeholder engagement is now is recognised as a fundamental accountability mechanism. It helps stakeholders in identifying, understanding and responding to sustainability issues and concerns, and to report, explain and be answerable to stakeholders for decisions, actions and performance.