The Vision

To remain the gold-standard recognition in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability in Africa.

The Mission

To lead the drive towards the actualization of the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa by enabling a platform that promotes, measures, and harmonizes the contributions of the private sector, government/public sector, and non-governmental organizations to attain set targets.

We live in a global, information age, where nothing can remain hidden for long. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated, more critical, and more demanding of corporate organizations. They choose to make purchases from firms that are perceived to be more consumer-friendly and consumer-focused, showing that they care about equity, equality, fairness, and justice in society. Nowadays, even children question the integrity of claims made in advertorials disseminated via the mass media communications and messaging by organizations that depended solely on the ‘wow-factor. In those times, organizations were seen as abstracts. A shift has taken place in this relationship. Due to the passionate connection with brands, consumers and other stakeholders see them more like human beings and connect to them. They also express their support, disdain, acceptance, or rejection based on these emotional triggers.  They now form public opinions about brands and organizations based on how these brands and organizations deal with issues that matter to them: poverty reduction, women empowerment, infrastructure development, education, environment, etc.

We foresaw these future trends that would change the face of corporate and marketing communications years ago as we planned to establish a strategic, research, customer-focused, and responsive public relations, stakeholder engagement, and marketing communications intervention.

Corporate/public engagement as a phenomenon has evolved. Through the various ages of greed, philanthropy, marketing, management, and had now arrived at a new dawn, otherwise known as the age of responsibility, would serve as a key market differentiator for another fifty years or even more.

Though Public Relations as a discipline has become better known, accepted, and practiced around Africa, we still find a lot of companies limiting the impact of their business activities because they would not allow themselves time to explore and enjoy the bountiful and longer-term rewards that CSR and Sustainability can bring to their business and bottom line.

We had our work cut out.  What strategies would increase public awareness about CSR as a legitimate discipline and a sprouting shoot with the capacity to grow into a forest of oak trees?

The first idea we had was to publish a biennial or quarterly online journal or magazine that would explore the depth, texture, and dimensions of CSR in Nigeria. This sounded good at the onset, but as we deliberated on this, digging deeper into the advantages and disadvantages, we realized that this type of publication would primarily appeal to those in corporate practice.  What strategies would be all-inclusive, we pondered? What strategies would enable us to involve the people, communities, NGOs, government, and other stakeholders? We went back to the drawing board.  Here, we would need to acknowledge the impact of friends of TruCSR who brainstormed with us, looking for that practical idea.

When we emerged from this round of brainstorming, it was evident that we would need to expand the concept beyond just publishing an online report.  This marked The SERAS’s birth as we know it today – where participating organizations showcase their work around corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability society. Society, in turn, assesses and rates the performance of participating organizations. Thus, both corporate and stakeholders set the agenda and plot the way forward for mutually beneficial future encounters.

Though the actual ceremony takes place for about four hours on a single night, the countdown to the D-day spans many months of activities and preparation. The highlights of these activities include the call for entry; submission of entries by participating organizations; the field trips to cited CSR projects; voting by the general public; and the meetings of the judges who make the final decisions regarding recipients of the prestigious SERAS statuettes.

The report component now fits in nicely to draw public attention to Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility practice in Nigeria in a format that firms and their stakeholders can access long after the awards cycle ends. The report also provides the platform for documenting the best practices encountered annually during our field trips around Nigeria, and the rest of Africa, to capture the essence of corporate interventions in communities – stakeholder engagements. As far as these engagements enrich and improve the lives and well-being of Africa’s peoples and simultaneously impact the bottom-line of organizations perceived as reasonable and responsible corporate citizens, our job is done.

The first edition of The SERAS was held on 19^th July 2007. The awards were first known as The Nigeria CSR Awards from 2007 to 2010. In 2011, it became known as SERA Awards. At the end of the 2011 cycle, we began to receive an increasing number of inquiries from organizations from other countries such as Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa, on how they could become part of the annual awards. The awards became open to the rest of Africa from the 2016 cycle, which marked the 10^th anniversary of the awards and was renamed The SERAS CSR Awards Africa. It has attracted participation from 19 African countries and is today the prime CSR and sustainability recognition in Africa.