By Corporate Social responsibility, I am referring to the continuing commitment by TTB, to behave ethically and contribute to the country’s economic development while improving the quality of life of our staff and their families as well as the local communities within the bank’s catchment areas and society at large. We at TTB also view social responsibilities as actions which do not have purely financial returns but which are demanded of us under some social contracts with our stakeholders.

We are quite aware that financial success alone is no longer the sole measure by which organisations are judged but by the extent to which such organisations are able and willing to reciprocate the love and kindness of society, such as helping to champion consumer rights/human rights, projecting sound business ethics, putting in place environmental policies, engaging in community development, ensuring good corporate governance practices, workplace welfare issues etc.

Businesses today are faced with stiff challenges to survive in terms of resources, while at the same time they are expected to fulfil society’s expectations of them, in order to become responsible corporate citizens. It is not so surprising, therefore, that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now being discussed at the board level for all serious organisations and CSR reporting has been gaining headlines in the last few years. All stakeholders, including consumers, are beginning to demand more information about the contributions of their companies to society.

It was in line with these that TTB formally documented its own policies on corporate social responsibilities some years back and this policy document has guided the bank in the discharge of its social responsibility obligations over the years. For your information, the current policy focuses more on Education and Health though some level of attention is also paid to other sectors, particularly socio-cultural affairs. Our friends from the media will agree with me that the bank has consistently and passionately supported these areas for the past few years.

The beneficiaries for this afternoon’s programme are 4 deprived basic schools selected from Kumasi. Each of these schools receives a donation sum of GHC4,000 for the procurement of reading books and other teaching aids to be named by the school. It may be recalled that the bank, on December 23, 2008, disbursed a total of GHC47,000 to some other 10 institutions in Accra, Tema and Kasoa. This brings the total amount disbursed by the bank to GH¢63,000 between December 2008 and January 2009.

It is also worthy of note that 11 out of the 14 institutions each received donation amounts of GH¢4,000 from the bank in 2007. The decision to make additional donations to the same schools is testimony to the fact that the bank has chosen to pursue the course of building sustainable long-term relations with the beneficiary institutions. With this, we are able to monitor to ensure that pupils/students from these schools really benefit from the bank’s generosity for a reasonable period of time. This, we believe is more meaningful to both the bank and the beneficiary institutions and it is my personal conviction that authorities at these schools will protect the materials donated for the usage of future generations of pupils/students.

I will leave the other details and the order in which they are presented to the MC to handle.

I wish to thank you all for making time to share the afternoon with us.

Thank you.