At Umthombo Wealth we believe that in the longer-term, high standards of ethical corporate responsibility and practices generally make good business sense, and as such contribute towards sustainable business operations. Therefore, we have intentionally integrated ESG considerations and evaluation in our investment approach and decision making. 

With this in mind, and based on our integral investment philosophy that is aimed at achieving sustainable risk-adjusted returns and outperformance, we acknowledge that: 

• ESG risks across investment sectors and securities are highly diverse and often difficult to identify and quantify, 
• Selected securities’ ESG practices a have high potential of influencing our investments and portfolios’ long term risk-adjusted-returns over the medium to long term, and 
• As one of the key parts of our investment decisions making and management process, we have to formally integrate ESG consideration as part of our securities’ analysis and selection, portfolio construction and active portfolio management. 

By formalizing the assessment of ESG practices as part of our investment approach we not only select compelling investment cases securities with good ESG practices but we also select compelling investment cases securities who ESG practises we acknowledge require further investigation. In such instances, Umthombo aims to address the concerning ESG practices through shareholder activism and engagements (e.g. proxy voting, company management engagements on behalf of our clients, tracking of trends at a company specific and industry level). 

Umthombo believes that as shareholders (on behalf of our clients), we can play an important role in influencing company behaviour to manage the concerning ESG practices. We intend to achieve this through engagement and possible collaborations with other shareholders in the industry (broader active stewardship).