The Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) has released its sixth Sustainable Development Report documenting the bank’s performance using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework.
Themed “Measures of Progress: Beyond Numbers, Beyond Banking,” the report showcases DBP’s sustainable development agenda and presents recent and ongoing initiatives to deliver much-needed funding in line with the bank’s development thrusts. The report discloses key financial and sustainability information wherein the bank’s products and services have made a great impact on countryside development, infrastructure development, social development, and small and medium enterprises.
The report is a milestone for DBP because of the transition from the old GRI G3 Standards in Sustainability Reporting to the latest GRI G4 Guidelines which was released in May 2013 requiring a meticulous systematic approach of materiality review and identification of new set of materiality aspects i.e. impact metrics which were not initially measured in previous Sustainable Reports.
The report makes DBP the first government financial institution that passed the Global Reporting Initiative Generation 4 (G4) Check Management in December 2015. GRI is an international, not-for-profit organization, based in Amsterdam, promoting sustainability reporting as a means to influence sustainable development in organizations worldwide. All sustainability reporters aim for the GRI seal to appear on its disclosures and reports. The G4 Standards came out only in May 2013 and DBP’s latest SDR subscribes to the latest standards.
DBP was also the first government financial institution in the country to release a sustainable development report. In 2014, the Bank received a special award for Best Sustainability Report from the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific (ADFIAP) Awards.
GRI founded sustainability reporting in the late 1990s. With the standards/ metrics that it released, it is now the widely-used criteria on reporting disclosures covering economic, environmental and social performances (triple bottom line). Ninety-three percent of the world’s largest 250 corporations report on their sustainability performance using the GRI standards.