INSIGHTS & ANALYSIS · 9 min read
Fifteen Sri Lankan Companies Have Made a Forward Faster Commitment. Eleven of Them Made Only One
Five weeks after Colombo hosted the UN Global Compact’s Asia-Pacific summit, the Forward Faster registry can be filtered by country and read line by line. Sri Lanka has 15 signatories and 38 commitments. Bangladesh has 09 signatories and 60 commitments. This is what the gap is made of, what it exposes a board to, and what to do about it before the next annual report.
By the ESGNexus Editorial Team · September 2026 · Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Sri Lankan companies have made thirty-eight Forward Faster commitments. The maximum available to them was 135. The shape of that gap — which targets were taken, which were left, and by whom — is the clearest picture currently available of how deep corporate sustainability commitment runs in this market, and it has not been published before.
On 4 August, previewing the summit that brought more than two hundred delegates to Colombo, ESGNexus reported that it could not determine how many Sri Lankan companies had adopted a Forward Faster target because the platform did not offer a country-filterable list. It does now, with a data export alongside it. ESGNexus retrieved both on 16 September 2026 and read every row.
What the Registry Actually Shows
Forward Faster is the UN Global Compact’s 2030 acceleration platform. It asks companies to commit publicly to specific, dated targets across five themes — gender equality, climate action, living wage, water resilience, and finance and investment — which between them carry nine separate target lines. Eligibility has one gate. In the Global Compact’s own words: “To commit to the Forward Faster targets, you must be a participant of the UN Global Compact.”
Globally, 2,043 companies appear on the registry. Fifteen of them are Sri Lankan. The Global Compact Network Sri Lanka, launched in 2011, counted 113 participants when ESGNexus checked on 16 September, up from the 111 recorded six weeks earlier. Of those figures, roughly 1 in 8 Sri Lankan participants has taken a Forward Faster target.
This is the full national cohort, with every commitment each company has made.
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Company |
Sector (registry classification) |
Targets committed |
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Talawakelle Tea Estates PLC |
Plantations |
All nine — the only Sri Lankan company to take every target |
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Zeal (Pvt) Ltd |
Software |
Eight — gender 1 and 2, climate 2, living wage 1 and 2, water, finance 1 and 2 |
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Kangara Holdings Pvt Ltd |
Fertilizers |
Seven — gender 1, climate 2, living wage 1 and 2, water, finance 1 and 2 |
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Hatton National Bank PLC |
Banks |
Three — gender 2 (equal pay), living wage 1, finance 1 |
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ATG Hand Care (Pvt) Ltd. |
Building Materials: Other |
One — climate 1 |
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Bogawantalawa Tea Estates PLC |
Plantations |
One — climate 1 |
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Brandix Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. |
Clothing and Accessories |
One — climate 1 |
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Dilmah Ceylon Tea Company PLC |
Brewers |
One — climate 1 |
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Hayleys Fabric PLC |
Textile Products |
One — climate 1 |
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Hirdaramani International Exports (Pvt) Ltd. |
Clothing and Accessories |
One — climate 1 |
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Horana Plantations PLC |
Plantations |
One — climate 1 |
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Kelani Valley Plantations PLC |
Plantations |
One — climate 1 |
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KPMG |
Professional Business Support Services |
One — climate 1 |
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MAS Holdings (Pvt) Ltd. |
Clothing and Accessories |
One — climate 1 |
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Diesel & Motor Engineering Plc. |
Auto Services |
One — climate 2 (just transition) |
Source: UN Global Compact, Forward Faster — Companies Taking Action, Sri Lanka country filter and .XLSX export, retrieved 16 September 2026 — forwardfaster.unglobalcompact.org. Sector labels are the registry’s own; Dilmah Ceylon Tea Company PLC is classified there as Brewers and ATG Hand Care as Building Materials.
Ten Companies, One Box
Eleven of the fifteen committed to exactly one target. Ten of those eleven chose the same one — Climate Action Target 1, which asks a company to “set corporate science-based net-zero emissions reductions targets through the Science Based Targets initiative, aligning action with a 1.5°C pathway with a goal of reaching net-zero by 2050 at the latest.” The eleventh, Diesel & Motor Engineering, chose the other climate target, on just transition.
The ten are Brandix, MAS Holdings, Hirdaramani International Exports, Hayleys Fabric, ATG Hand Care, Dilmah, Bogawantalawa Tea Estates, Horana Plantations, Kelani Valley Plantations and KPMG. Nine of the fifteen companies in the cohort operate in tea, plantations, apparel, or textiles — export sectors whose European and North American customers already require a validated decarbonisation pathway as a condition of supply.
The registry records what a company chose, not why. Three readings fit, and none excludes the others: the climate target is the one buyers already ask about, it is the only one of the nine with an established external validation route, and it is the one a company is most likely to have a measurement system for, because carbon accounting is a decade ahead of living wage accounting almost everywhere.
What the pattern does establish is direction. This cohort looks less like a map of where Sri Lankan boards have decided to lead, and more like a map of what their customers have already asked them for.
The Targets Almost Nobody Took
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100 per cent of employees across the organisation earn a living wage by 2030. |
Four of the fifteen took that target: Hatton National Bank, Kangara Holdings, Talawakelle and Zeal. Three took the water resilience target. Three took equal representation across all levels of management. Three took equal pay for work of equal value.
Two of those gaps matter more here than the global averages suggest. Water is the first. ESGNexus reported this month that the National Water Supply and Drainage Board was trucking water to roughly 113,000 people, and that plantations and apparel are the sectors most exposed when a dry season runs long. Nine of the fifteen signatories work in exactly those two sectors. Three took the water target, and no apparel manufacturer is among them.
Wages are the second. Brandix, MAS Holdings and Hirdaramani are among the largest private employers in the country. All three are on the registry, and all three took the climate target and nothing else.
That needs a boundary drawn around it. Declining to sign a target is not evidence that a company is not doing the thing. Sri Lankan apparel manufacturers publish wage, gender, and water data in their own sustainability reports and customer audit programmes, with several of them doing so for years. What the registry measures is narrower: whether a company was willing to put a dated, public number against the commitment. That question gets harder to avoid every year.
Three Companies Are Carrying the Country
Talawakelle Tea Estates PLC committed to all nine targets. It is the only Sri Lankan company on the registry that did. Zeal, a private software firm, took eight. Kangara Holdings, a private fertiliser company, took seven. Between them, those three hold twenty-four of Sri Lanka’s thirty-eight commitments — sixty-three per cent of the national total — from three companies out of fifteen.
Breadth does not track size here. The two firms that committed most widely after Talawakelle are private companies most readers will not have heard of, while Sri Lanka’s largest listed conglomerates do not appear on the registry at all. Nor do its largest banks, with one exception: Hatton National Bank is the only financial institution in the cohort that took equal pay, living wage, and SDG-aligned investment.
How Sri Lanka Compares — On Participation, and On Depth
Participation rates are the comparison that gets quoted, and they flatter Sri Lanka. The comparison that matters is how many signatories from each country actually signed. ESGNexus read the registry row by row for three regional peers as well, using the same method, and counted every commitment against the maximum available to that cohort.
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Country |
Signatories, and share of its Global Compact network |
Commitments made, against the maximum available |
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Bangladesh |
9 — 11.1% of 81 participants |
60 of 81 — 74.1% |
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Indonesia |
18 — 9.0% of 201 participants |
62 of 162 — 38.3% |
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India |
75 — 14.8% of 508 participants |
191 of 675 — 28.3% |
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Sri Lanka |
15 — 13.3% of 113 participants |
38 of 135 — 28.1% |
Source: UN Global Compact, Forward Faster — Companies Taking Action, country filters for Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia, every result page read on 16 September 2026; UN Global Compact, Engage Locally country pages, same date — unglobalcompact.org. The maximum is the signatory count multiplied by the nine available target lines. The participation ratio compares two related but non-identical populations — Forward Faster attributes a company to the country in its Global Compact profile, while the participant count is the membership of the local network — and is indicative rather than exact. The commitment counts are exact.
Sri Lanka is second among the four in participation and last in depth. Bangladesh is the reverse: the fewest signatories, and nearly twice as many commitments as Sri Lanka from a cohort of nine. Not one Bangladeshi signatory took a single target and stopped — the least committed took four.
The composition is close to a mirror image. Nine of Bangladesh’s nine took the living wage target, and one took the science-based climate target. Eleven of Sri Lanka’s fifteen took the climate target and four took the living wage. Two garment-exporting economies, selling to overlapping customers, have produced opposite profiles.
Two caveats before that is read as a verdict. Nine companies are a small, self-selected sample in which two signatories move the percentage by a fifth. And the cohorts are not matched: Sri Lanka’s contains a bank, a Big Four firm and four plantation companies, which Bangladesh’s does not.
What travels is the direction. A buyer comparing its Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi suppliers on this register today sees wage and gender commitments on one side of the page and carbon on the other. Whether that reflects what each set of buyers has audited for, what each industry’s history made unavoidable, or which country network ran the harder campaign, the register does not say. It shows the result.
India is the useful control. Its signatories filled 28.3% of their maximum, compared with Sri Lanka’s 28.1%, and 50 of its 75 companies took exactly one target — the same single-box pattern at five times the scale. Whatever produced the Sri Lankan result, it is not peculiar to Sri Lanka.
Will Anybody Ever Verify These Commitments?
The honest answer is that the Global Compact has announced no third-party assurance regime for Forward Faster, and the existing mechanism was not designed to catch an inaccurate number.
There is no validation of a commitment at the point it is made. Progress is reported through the annual Communication on Progress — a CEO statement of continued support plus a questionnaire, submitted by the company through the Global Compact’s own platform — and the guidance for that platform states that the Global Compact “does not have any responsibility for the accuracy of the data submitted.”
An enforcement mechanism does exist, and it is sharper than most people assume, but it points elsewhere. A participant that misses its reporting deadline is marked non-communicating, and one that has not filed by 31 December is delisted on 1 January. You can be expelled for failing to report. You cannot be expelled for missing a target, or for reporting a number nobody checked.
Two routes to external verification already run around the edges, and boards should know which is which. Climate Action Target 1 is the only one of the nine that routes through an independent validator by design, because it requires targets set through the Science Based Targets initiative: a company either has an SBTi submission or it does not. The second is domestic and closes faster. For listed companies, sustainability disclosures are included in the audited annual report under SLFRS S1 and S2, and assurance follows the reporting. The pledge remains unaudited; the number published against it will not be.
None of this is a reason to dismiss the register. A Forward Faster commitment is public, dated, and expressed as an outcome, making it one of the few corporate sustainability statements in this market that can be checked against a company’s own annual report four years from now. ESGNexus reported this month that the CSR figure in Sri Lankan annual reports has not carried reasonable assurance since March 2023. Against that baseline, a dated public target is more accountability infrastructure than most of what sits beside it, not less.
What It Costs to Sign Nothing, or to Sign One Thing
Start with what is not true. There is no penalty. Nobody is fined, delisted, or excluded from a tender for declining a Forward Faster commitment, and ESGNexus is aware of no cases of Sri Lankan companies losing business due to their absence from this register. Any argument resting on imminent punishment is unsupported.
The exposure is comparability, and it changed character the moment the registry became filterable. The tables in this article took a morning to build from public data. A buyer’s sustainability team, a lender’s credit committee, an index provider or a journalist can now produce the same comparison for any country in an afternoon — including the row showing nine Bangladeshi suppliers holding wage and gender commitments beside a Sri Lankan supplier holding one carbon commitment. That comparison did not exist in August. It exists now; it will be repeated, and the company has no say in when it happens.
The second exposure runs the other way, and boards consistently underweight it. A commitment is a target, and for a listed company a target is a disclosure obligation. A 2030 pledge adopted for the announcement, without the measurement system behind it, becomes an annual disclosure of missed progress inside an audited report. The reputational risk of a shallow commitment profile is slow and comparative. The reporting risk of an unfunded commitment is specific and dated. Weigh both.
Why This Stops Being Voluntary in the Current Financial Year
Eight of the fifteen are listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange: Bogawantalawa Tea Estates, Diesel & Motor Engineering, Dilmah Ceylon Tea, Hatton National Bank, Hayleys Fabric, Horana Plantations, Kelani Valley Plantations and Talawakelle. That matters because of a timetable already in place.
SLFRS S1 and SLFRS S2 have been available for voluntary application since reporting periods beginning 1 January 2024. Mandatory application is phased: the top 100 CSE companies by market capitalisation from periods beginning 1 January 2025, all Main Board entities from periods beginning 1 January 2026, other listed entities from 2027, unlisted companies with turnover above Rs. 10 billion from 2028, above Rs. 5 billion from 2029, and Empower Board and remaining monitored entities from 2030.
SLFRS S1 adopts the content of IFRS S1, which requires disclosure across four core areas: governance, strategy, the processes used to identify and manage sustainability-related risks and opportunities, and performance — the last defined as “the entity’s performance in relation to sustainability-related risks and opportunities, including progress towards any targets the entity has set or is required to meet by law or regulation.”
Read that clause against a Forward Faster commitment. It is a target the entity has set, and it is public and dated. The company does not get to choose whether it appears — only how well prepared the disclosure is when it does. For the listed eight, the year that began on 1 January 2026 is the first in which the pledge and the audited annual report sit on the same desk. The seven unlisted names reach the standard later, at the turnover thresholds, but they do reach it. Being private buys time, not exemption.
Getting a commitment ready for that disclosure is narrower than a full reporting programme. It is mostly plumbing, and four things must be in place before a target can be reported rather than merely stated.
- A baseline year and a written boundary — which entities, which sites, which part of the value chain. Most disputes about progress turn out to be disputes about boundary.
- A metric that produces the same number twice. If the target is a percentage of employees, define the denominator — permanent, contract, agency, seasonal — and define it the same way next year.
- An owner and a data route: a named executive, the system the number comes out of, and a frequency. Payroll for wages, HRIS by management tier for gender, meter and catchment data for water.
- A governance trail. S1 asks who oversees the risk, so board or committee minutes have to show the target being reviewed, not approved once and filed.
Source: IFRS Foundation, IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information — ifrs.org; IFRS Foundation, Jurisdiction Profile: Sri Lanka — ifrs.org. The four preparation points are ESGNexus’s reading of what S1’s performance and governance requirements imply in practice, not text from the standard.
What to Do Now
1. Find out whether your group is on the registry, and what it signed. A commitment made by a subsidiary, a joint venture or a previous management team is still a public, dated target carrying your name. Filter the registry by Sri Lanka and read the row before a buyer, an analyst or a journalist does it for you.
2. Prioritise additional targets on materiality first, measurement readiness second, optics never. Three tests in order. Is the theme material to this business — water for a plantation or a wet-process textile mill, wages for a labour-intensive manufacturer, gender representation for a bank or professional firm? Can you produce the number already, or is the system a year away? Will a customer, lender or regulator ask for it inside the target horizon? A theme passing the first two is a candidate now. One passing only the third is a commitment you will spend four years explaining.
3. Sequence rather than batch — and say that you are sequencing. Nothing requires all nine at once, and a company that adds a second and third target in successive years reads better than one that signs nine and reports progress on two. Resource constraint is a legitimate answer. An unstated resource constraint looks like indifference, which is exactly how the eleven single-target rows above will be read by anyone who does not know the reason.
4. Map each commitment to a line in your S1 target disclosure, then build the plumbing. For a Main Board issuer, the period that began on 1 January 2026 is the one in which set targets, metrics,s and progress must appear. The pledge already qualifies as a set target; the work is the baseline, the boundary, the denominator and the governance trail. Start that now, and the first disclosure is a report. Start it in the fourth quarter, and it is a reconstruction.
5. If you are considering a new commitment, price the reporting, not the signature. What follows is annual progress reporting to the Global Compact and, for a listed company, an S1 disclosure. The cost sits in the measurement system — payroll analysis against a living wage benchmark, catchment-level water data, management-tier gender data. Commit to what you can count, then extend.
What ESGNexus Will Track From Here
ESGNexus will re-read this registry quarterly, for Sri Lanka and the same three peers, and publish what changed: who joined, who added targets, and whether the depth gap against Bangladesh narrows. From the 2026 reporting season,n we will also track which commitments reach the company’s own annual report with a metric and a progress figure attached — the point at which a pledge becomes a disclosure. For the listed eight, 2030 is four reporting cycles away: close enough to audit, far enough to fix. Forward Faster lines will be carried in ESGNexus company disclosure profiles wherever a company holds one.
Sources & Further Reading
UN Global Compact, “Forward Faster — Companies Taking Action” (Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia country filters, every result page, and the registry .XLSX export), retrieved 16 September 2026 — forwardfaster.unglobalcompact.org
UN Global Compact, “Forward Faster — Take Action”, retrieved 16 September 2026 — forwardfaster.unglobalcompact.org
UN Global Compact, “Communication on Progress”, participation and reporting guidance, retrieved 16 September 2026 — unglobalcompact.org
IFRS Foundation, “IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information” — ifrs.org
UN Global Compact, Forward Faster target pages for climate action, living wage, gender equality, water resilience and finance and investment, retrieved 16 September 2026 — forwardfaster.unglobalcompact.org
UN Global Compact, “Engage Locally — Sri Lanka”, “Bangladesh”, “India” and “Indonesia”, retrieved 16 September 2026 — unglobalcompact.org
UN Global Compact, “Business Leaders from Across Asia-Pacific Convene in Sri Lanka to Accelerate Sustainable and Inclusive Growth”, 12 August 2026 — prnewswire.co.uk
IFRS Foundation, “Jurisdiction Profile: Sri Lanka”, sustainability disclosure jurisdictional profiles — ifrs.org
Colombo Stock Exchange, listed company directory, retrieved 16 September 2026 — cse.lk
ESGNexus, “Sixty Global Sustainability Leaders Land in Colombo Next Week”, 4 August 2026 — esgnexus.lk
ESGNexus, “Seven Times, an Auditor Vouched for a Sri Lankan CSR Number. All Seven Were Before March 2023”, 16 September 2026 — esgnexus.lk
ESGNexus, “Sri Lanka Is Trucking Water to 113,000 People”, 7 September 2026 — esgnexus.lk
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About ESGNexus |
Data disclaimer: Information in this article is sourced from publicly available documents. ESGNexus does not independently verify company disclosures. Errors and omissions excepted.