As often presented, extra-financial analysis consists of evaluating the commitments, the policies implemented and the results of companies, but also of States and local authorities, on social, societal, environmental and governance criteria. The extra-financial rating market started in the USA, at the request of asset managers, for the information of institutional investors and private individuals with moral requirements.

Originally, it was a question of investing the funds of religious communities in accordance with their principles, by excluding “sin stocks”, i.e. the shares of arms companies, alcohol producers and pornography producers.

While this practice of excluding certain financial asset portfolios still exists today, particularly in the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries, so-called responsible or ethical finance has also developed in countries such as France, under the impetus of concerns related to sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.

Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) is defined as the set of investment practices that integrate considerations on the environmental, social and governance policies of companies; what we call ESG criteria. The choice of the portfolio manager is no longer guided by financial profitability alone.

So-called “societal” rating agencies work on behalf of investors, processing non-financial information from a panel of companies large enough to be able to make comparisons between them, in order to either create an “ESG filter” for investors, or to create “responsible” stock market indices, i.e. stock market indices that only include companies that meet minimum conditions on these three criteria.

Unfortunately, the African continent is still lagging behind in this vast market for the promotion of social responsibility and therefore good governance.

As a result, in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, performance measurement has been limited to the sole economic and financial dimension.

The birth of Elone Partner’s is a reasonable response to the need to correct this double weakness. On the one hand, with regard to the modeling of good governance practices, through the CSR approach, and on the other hand, the modeling of extra-financial rating, as a factor of legitimization of the credibility and performance of an institution, in the full sense of the term.