Abstract

The need to communicate social and environmental effects of business operations to society has been with us for
over four decades now. However, due to diverse factors the pace of introducing social and environmental
reporting in developing countries has been slow. The purposes of this study are: to determine whether companies
listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange and Parastatals in Botswana report on social and environmental issues in
their annual reports and to what extent they disclose such information; to establish whether there is a difference
in the level of reporting between listed companies and parastatals; and to determine whether size, type of
industry and ownership influence the extent of disclosure. All listed companies and parastatals operating in
Botswana formed the population of this study. Secondary data obtained from annual reports was reviewed and
content analysis was employed to determine the extent of social and environment reporting. The extent of
disclosure was measured using number of sentences describing the key themes such as human resources,
environmental issues and community involvement. Regression analysis was used to find the association between
dependent variable (extent of disclosure) and three independent variables namely size of the company,
ownership and type of industry. The results suggest that social and environment reporting exists in Botswana
entities and listed companies tend to disclose more than parastatals. The findings also show that size, type of
industry and ownership are not good predictors of the level of social and environmental disclosure in Botswana
entities.

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