Eight hundred direct jobs. Over 1,600 more across the value chain. 1,500 workers on site at peak — and a 60% drop in local crime since construction began. Club Med attributes those outcomes to its coastal safari development in northern KwaZulu-Natal. They’re the kind of real-world impact communities care about — yet most of it would barely feature in a global ESG scorecard.
That gap was the focus of the panel, Profit, Planet, People: How Global Hospitality is Scaling in Southern Africa Responsibly, hosted at a SADC Tourism Alliance Think Tank.
For developers navigating sustainability requirements, operators under pressure to prove impact, and investors managing international compliance expectations, understanding how ESG translates in this region needs to be reassessed, agreed the panellists.
“We should stop treating ESG as a certificate on the wall,” said Olivier Perillat‑Piratoine, Managing Director for Club Med South Africa. “In our business, it has to be the operating system — the way we design, source, and develop people.” For Club Med, that means recognised building and operating standards, blended with domestic finance, local supply chains, and long-term talent development. It includes sending 200 South Africans overseas for training ahead of the resort’s 2026 opening.
The challenge comes when templates developed in global north markets are applied to Southern Africa without nuance. Infrastructure is uneven, small and rural enterprises play a major role in supply, and job creation remains a critical development goal. The panel’s message wasn’t that ESG is wrong — but that how it’s measured often misses what actually matters on the ground.
“Globally, the centre of gravity is the ‘E’,” said Lopang Rapodile, ESG Manager at Kasada. “Here, the ‘S’ — jobs, skills, women in leadership, township inclusion — is often the licence to operate. If we don’t elevate that, we miss what sustains hospitality in this region.”
Projects with strong environmental metrics but little local impact can glide through ESG review, while others that offer inclusive hiring and local supplier spend get held back because they don’t tick the standard boxes. That’s not just inconvenient — it’s a barrier to building responsibly where it’s needed most.
Focus has fallen on what’s easiest to measure: energy per occupied room, water use per guest‑night, and food waste reduction. These indicators do matter — they also save money. But they don’t tell the whole story.
“You can count diesel consumption,” said Simon Stobbs, Managing Director South Africa at Wilderness. “You can’t count the pride of a parent with a stable job, or the resilience a community builds when its farms supply a lodge year‑round. Those intangibles are the foundation for everything else.” Wilderness, which began as a conservation organisation, sees hiring and sourcing locally not as virtue signalling, but as the only way to operate in remote locations.
Employment metrics can also be misleading. For example, a delegate shared that global companies tend to fixate on staff‑to‑room ratios without accounting for local context. What appears inefficient by European or American standards often enables opportunity in local ones: teams with more time to train, better guest ratios, and broader direct economic impact. Yet this rarely gets acknowledged in reporting frameworks dominated by cost or emissions per room.
This is where global ESG can either support or hinder hospitality’s role in Southern Africa. Done well, ESG frameworks offer access to funding, drive better upfront project decisions, and build stronger awareness of sustainability across operations. Club Med’s approach is a good example: global standards on construction and energy, paired with local partnerships and training built into the rollout.
But rigid frameworks can have the opposite effect. Small suppliers — many of them women-led and township-based — are expected to provide formal documentation, consistent volume, and low costs from day one. Payment schedules are rarely designed for their cash flow cycles. Valuable tools, like food waste tracking systems, exist — but adoption is slow when service support is located offshore and procurement models bypass local tech.
“The scale bias is real,” said Rapodile. “We want to localise procurement, but consistency and volume expectations lock out smaller vendors. That’s solvable — with aggregated orders, practical QA support, and faster payments — but it requires design choices, not just intent.”
So, do global ESG metrics help or harm Southern Africa’s hospitality?
The answer, as the panel made clear, is both. ESG helps when used as a baseline that allows for local realities, and when funders accept meaningful indicators that reflect impact on the ground. But it harms when applied without context, draining time, resources, and opportunity from the very businesses and communities hospitality is meant to support.
If ESG is going to work here, it will need to adapt — not in principle, but in practice. That could mean adjusting how social performance is measured. It could also mean changing the systems surrounding ESG — procurement, auditing, tech access — so more small businesses can participate, and so the value created stays in the region.
“Don’t ask us to choose between carbon and communities,” Rapodile said. “In SADC, social outcomes are the business case.”
Stobbs agreed: “If the purpose is impact, guests feel it, teams live it, and communities back it. The rest follows.”
And Perillat‑Piratoine’s challenge still stands: “Make ESG local and real, and it becomes a competitive advantage, not a burden.”
The frameworks aren’t the enemy — but the way we use them will decide whether hospitality grows in the way this region needs.