Sustainable development reporting practices by Nigerian banks

Abstract

Business activities could, in uncontrolled circumstances, produce unfortunate negative Environmental and Social (E&S) impacts, necessitating the involvement of organizations in sustainability practices. In Nigeria, deposit money banks are few of the organizations that dedicate noticeable number of pages in their annual reports to reporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. By our reckoning, knowing whether firm characteristics in any way affect the level of involvement in CSR, and whether the practice differ among banks, merit research attention, which is the focus of this paper. A checklist containing 30 items was developed to content-analyse the 2012 published annual reports of 12 selected publicly quoted banks for sustainability practice disclosures. It was observed that Nigerian banks were involved mostly in the social aspect of sustainability; sustainable solution practices among them were not significantly different though. Firm characteristics such as size and profitability were found not to affect sustainability practice.