ABSTRACT
There are two areas in which the author believes South Africa has made a significant contribution to the worldwide quest for sustainable business. They are corporate governance and economic empowerment. Following the success of the UK's Cadbury Report in 1992, South Africa launched its own King Report on Corporate Governance in 1994, under the chairmanship of former High Court judge and company director, Mervyn E. King. King went much further than Cadbury in recognising the non-financial aspects of corporate governance and incorporating the concept of wider stakeholder accountability. The second lesson that the author took away from his time with KPMG in South Africa has to do with the issue of black economic empowerment (BEE), which has strong resonance to later concepts of bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) strategies, inclusive business and corporate shared value. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) scorecard was designed to cover seven areas, namely ownership, management control, employment equity, skills development, preferential procurement, enterprise development and socioeconomic development.
