Social performance

Our strategic objective is to  advance socioeconomic development and opportunities by partnering with communities to build resilience and reduce dependency on our operations. This is challenging when the immediate, short-term needs in many of our communities are high. Our aim is to focus our efforts on developing programmes that contribute to longer-term social objectives through activities such as enterprise and job creation, education, health and wellbeing and capacity building. 

We base our socioeconomic development activities on the resources, needs and plans identified at a local or regional level, which is informed by relevant data gathering and community engagement.

From these assessments, we expect our industrial assets to design stakeholder engagement strategies aligned with our business objectives and their local needs. Our objective is to work towards creating meaningful, constructive, and proactive dialogue with our local communities. 

We expect our industrial assets to engage with their local communities in a range of different ways, tailored to the local context and culture. These may include radio broadcasts, social media channels, site publications, complaints and grievance mechanisms and face-to-face meetings.

Our community consultation processes are designed to be inclusive, respectful of local context, cultures, and traditions. We seek to identify vulnerable groups, such as women, children and Indigenous Peoples, and develop and implement strategies to include them in the engagement process. For more information, see Indigenous Peoples.

In addition, we contribute to local economies through our use of local suppliers, wages and employee benefits, voluntary support of socio-economic initiatives such as health and education projects, and infrastructure improvements. 

We understand the detrimental impact of corruption on the capacity for regions and nations to fully realise rights and benefits due to them from resource development. We support efforts to combat corruption including through transparency initiatives and our own compliance initiatives, as we discuss further in our 2024 Ethics and Compliance Report. 

Our annual Payments to Governments Report addresses our UK regulatory obligations under DTR 4.3A of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules (UK Transparency Requirements), which were introduced to implement the payments to governments requirements provided for in the EU Transparency and Accounting Directives. It also includes our commodity trading payments made to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in countries that have implemented the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) for the purchase of oil and gas and minerals and metals originating in those countries .

We have been an active supporter of the EITI since 2011 and its principles of transparency and accountability. We participate in in-country forums supporting the EITI and, at a corporate level, in the EITI Commodity Trading Transparency working group. We recognise the contribution of EITI’s principles of transparency and accountability towards establishing a global standard of good governance for the extractives and commodity trading industries. As part of our extractive business, our industrial assets in EITI-implementing countries contribute, where applicable, to the national EITI reports by providing the relevant EITI disclosure to the multi-stakeholder-groups in the relevant country. Since 2017, we have disclosed our commodity trading payments made to SOEs in EITI-implementing countries for oil and gas purchases and since 2019, for metals and minerals.