The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) announced the organization of its First Conference on Sustainable Development by the end of this month in presence of a large number of business leaders, local and foreign investors, and with the participation of local and international high-level officials. The conference’ opening session will be attended by the Minister of Investment, the Minister of Environment, Chairman of the Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority (EFSA) and EGX’ Chairman, While the rest of the conference’ sessions will witness the participation of a number of high-level international organizations such as the United Nations program for women in Egypt and the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) in addition to a number of the business community’ leaders who have demonstrated a clear commitment to provide business models that are compatible with sustainable development efforts.
This comes as per EGX’ efforts to support sustainable development practices and to encourage the business community to achieve greater commitment to integrate the sustainable development in the internal business strategies. EGX is considered as a pioneer exchange worldwide in encouraging the private sector companies to be committed to the sustainable development mechanisms, as being one of the first 5 stock exchanges in the world that launched the Sustainable Stock Exchanges’ initiative (SSE) for Exchanges with sustainable development and social responsibility in 2009. The aim of this initiative, founded by the U.N. Secretary-General, is to increase the listed companies’ transparency and commitment to the environmental and social issues management and corporate governance.
Dr. Mohammed Omran, EGX Chairman stated that the Egyptian Exchange’ attention to sustainable development is a strategic dimension stems from its fundamental role to serve the development plans, which is no longer limited to provide billions to finance the Egyptian companies and help them to expand and offer more job opportunities only , but its role is extended now to include the initiatives and efforts of deepening the business community involvement in development and sustainability plans, where we work closely with the local private sector in order to increase awareness and capacity building with regard to maintain a profitable investment environment with a community orientation at the same time.
Omran said that his recent participation in the meetings of the UN’ Sustainable Stock Exchanges’ initiative (SSE), which was held on the sidelines of the latest UN General Assembly meetings has focused on a structural shift in the initiative work to activate the stock exchanges’ role to serve the 17 UN sustainable development ’ axes (SDG) and their 169 sub-targets, specially in the areas of gender equality, access to the relevant sustainable development information, finding solutions to the partnership and the regional and international dialogue about the development issues.
Omran declared that the meetings focused on the stock exchanges’ role in terms of providing finance to achieve those goals that become the focus of policy makers worldwide, pointing that EGX largely focused on a number of initiatives to achieve progress on the level of objectives’ implementation locally during the recent period.
EGX chairman mentioned at the end of his speech that the first Sustainability Conference will present an important step of the Egyptian Exchange, stressing that the attention in the coming period is that EGX could play an active role in establishing an international dialogue to lead the emerging markets for further sustainable development application, specially that the emerging countries are the most countries requiring and benefiting of those efforts.
It is worth to say that EGX was invited to the Third UN Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa during last July to talk about its experience in Sustainability, Social Responsibility and the finance role in achieving sustainable development goals.
