21 March 2016
To our stakeholders:
At Symbiotic, we believe that we can make an honest and fair living, even when private sector is faced with serious governance issues that have come to the fore over recent months. We subscribe to the tenets of the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of Human Rights, Labor, Environment and Anti-Corruption, continually seeking ways in which we can improve with the aim of full and seamless integration into our business strategy, culture and daily operations. As and when we can, we continue to be vocal about these principles as they should be at the core of any business operation.
Sincerely,
Mr. Mbugua Njihia
Chief Executive Officer

Human capital drives us and as such we can not divorce ourselves from the issue of human rights. In the area of tech we grapple less with matters around children's rights and human trafficking but are making effort to be more inclusive when it comes to the area of persons with disabilities. We reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

We hope to grow the team by another 14 - 20 staff this year and venture into new territories. Key for us will be to ensure we keep awareness of human rights issues top of mind.

The nature of our current set up means we interact with every member of team almost on a daily basis and everyone knows and sees what is going on. As mentioned earlier we will have to look at scalable ways of ensuring open communication is maintained even as we expand and with time ensure policies are set in place that would speak into remedial action should an incident be reported.

As a company, we subscribe to the ILO Declaration covers that covers four fundamental principles and rights at work, namely; Freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining ; Elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour , Effective abolition of child labour , Elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. We recognize the need for all our members of staff to have adequate compensation for their time and work they have done, with reasonable downtime in any given work year.

While our industry segment has no union per se, we have set in motion a process that will deliver a transparent work review and remuneration upgrade framework even as we look to grow our staff to between 24 and 30.

We have recently bench marked our remuneration packages with those of our peers in the market and are very pleased with our ranking. It had been opined that we pay way above what others are willing to fork out but we are keen to retain talent and remain cognizant of the fact that we are not dealing with just one person but a staffer with a family and other responsibilities outside the walls of our office.

We have become aware of the real impact of travel for work especially in light of staffers living in vastly different places. While we do not number in the hundreds yet, seeing that everyone essentially uses their car to come to work means our carbon footprint is large for an organisation of our size.

We also noted that running an in-house collocation facility for our systems contributed greatly to our energy spend and believed that we can do better.

On the collocation issue we have since moved to the cloud where we believe that there are better economies of scale for dedicated providers to better manage energy consumption and invest in cleaner and greener technology.

Still lots of work to be done on this front as the business matures.

We have a strongly spoken company policy of zero-tolerance for corruption, bribery and extortion. We have suffered greatly for this in light of delayed or lost projects that require the participation of certain publics whose representatives both openly or covertly seek to be compromised to take action.

With our continued growth agenda that is heavily inclined to the enterprise and most recently government, we are continue to work on written policy that will ensure alignment to our company culture and code for all our staffers, partners, associated and other publics with whom we interact and seek to do business with us. Key output of this policy will be a protocol to guide staff in situations where they are confronted with extortion or bribery and a statement requiring business partners and suppliers to adhere to the Global Compact anti-corruption principles that will be included in all contracts and statements of work going forward.

We are aware of the possible forms of corruption - bribery, extortion, fraud, embezzlement, collusion, abuse of discretion, favoritism, gift-giving, nepotism, cronyism, patronage etc and keep the collective gut sensitive. The physical manifestation of our policy is keenly awaited as this will serve as an addendum to all commercial documents that we output and also be visibly represented under our ways of work and culture on various pubic media. We need to move it up the priority agenda more proactively as time is easily taken away on the day to day and this is a process for which we are engaging external consultants.