It all came to a glorious end on Friday November 20th, 2015 at the grand finale of the ninth edition of the Nigeria CSR awards, otherwise known as The SERAs came to an eventful close that left many of the guests and participants happy to have been part of the well laid out event.
Fifty-two organisations entered for this year’s awards. However, ExxonMobil, Shell, Nigerian Breweries, Lafarge, BATNF, Airtel, Nigerian Stock Exchange, Cornerstone Insurance, GTBank, Total Nigeria, Promasidor, DHL, FCMB, First Bank, Dangote, Etisalat, Samsung Mobile, Protection Plus, Frieslandcampina, Sahara Energy amongst others all made it to the finale.
The keynote address was delivered by the co-founder of Transparency International, former minister for education, and former vice president of the World Bank (Africa), Obiageli Ezekwesili. Senator Ben Ayade, the executive governor of Cross River State and Senator Ben Murray Bruce were awarded Sustainability champions of the year. While business mogul Aliko Dangote was honoured as CSR and Sustainability man of the year.
The audience at the event were mesmerized by performances from Yinka Davies, Edi Zycs (the new poster boy for jazz music in Nigeria) and Ire the stage Devi who performed The SERas Theme Song.
Twenty awards were won and the overall price for 2015 went to Exxonmobil. Etisalat who had earlier won two categories emerged the first runner up. While Lafarge was second runner up overall.
The awards are Nigeria’s top CSR and sustainability honours. The awards process is designed to integrate principles and framework of the Global compact, global reporting Initiative, the sustainable development goals and ISO 26000.
