Corporate Governance Reporting: The Best Practices

Corporate governace reporting has become a crucial topic in Africa and requirements are intensifying. As of this year, it has shifted from a “nice-to-have” compliance checklist to a core strategic requirement for doing business on the continent. With rapid regulatory changes being made to attract foreign investment, digital governance exploding onto the scene, and international capital coming with strict requirements, corporate governance reporting has become critical for organizations.

These pressures come as directors face a strategic pivot. According to the Diligent Institute’s What Directors Think 2025 report, 41% of directors now cite strategy as their top oversight challenge, surpassing cybersecurity for the first time in years. This shift reflects a broader reality: corporate governance reporting is no longer a backwards-looking compliance exercise. It’s a strategic function that shapes how boards communicate risk oversight, demonstrate accountability and build stakeholder confidence.

To help you navigate current requirements and emerging standards, this guide explains:

• What corporate governance reporting entails and who is responsible for producing it
• What to include in a corporate governance report
• Best practices for effective governance reporting
• How AI-enhanced technology transforms governance reporting efficiency

What Is A Corporate Governance Report?

A corporate governance report is an ethically driven disclosure that reflects how corporations monitor their actions, policies, practices and decisions, as well as the effect of those actions on stakeholders. These reports provide shareholders with visibility into how the corporation conducts business, specifically the corporation’s structure, governance model, activities and performance.

They also typically include information about governance procedures, regulatory compliance, company and board performance, board composition and how effectively the company follows good governance practices. They serve multiple functions:

• Demonstrating accountability to shareholders
• Satisfying regulatory requirements
• Building trust with investors and business partners

Per the Diligent Institute’s What Directors Think 2025 report, 76% of directors are prioritizing growth opportunities — a sharp turnaround from recent years focused on cost-cutting. This strategic shift makes governance reporting even more critical, as boards must demonstrate both opportunity pursuit and appropriate risk oversight to stakeholders.

Who Writes the Corporate Governance Report?

In most large organizations, governance and compliance reporting falls under the direction of the chief compliance officer (CCO). The CCO is responsible for establishing company-wide standards and implementing procedures to ensure that governance and compliance programs effectively identify, prevent, detect and correct noncompliance issues with applicable laws, regulations, industry standards or company policies.

In practice, however, corporate governance reports are often coordinated by the corporate secretary or governance team, working closely with the CCO, finance, risk and ESG teams. Members of the compliance department and the corporate secretary may recruit or consult with subject matter experts to complete particular sections and often gather data from across the organization through polling and questionnaires.

In smaller organizations or those without a compliance officer, the responsibility may fall on a member of the legal department or another qualified employee. When choosing a manager to lead a compliance reporting team, find someone with expertise in the particular business operation under review and the regulations or mandates involved.

This manager may need temporary relief from typical duties, as compliance reporting can require significant time and effort.

Who Reads the Corporate Governance Report?

Corporate governance and compliance reporting can have various audiences, depending on the particular focus of the report and whether or not the report is internal or outward-facing.

• External reports are usually part of larger compliance audits that organizations undergo as part of regulatory reviews. These reports are read by members of appropriate regulatory agencies and can be integral in determining whether the organization faces fines, sanctions or other penalties. A thorough compliance and governance report indicates that the organization operates in good faith and may influence regulators to work with the company toward remediation rather than penalties.
• Internal compliance reports are often more targeted in scope. A broad summary of compliance and governance efforts might be presented to board members or select stakeholders to demonstrate the company’s position relative to current regulations and good governance procedures. The details might also concern specific departments whose work with new regulations informs their business dealings or future plans.

The details of compliance and corporate governance reporting might also concern a select department whose work with new regulations informs their business dealings or future plans. Finally, the organization may use the lessons gleaned from a compliance report to educate the wider workforce on the importance and necessity of following standard procedures and policies.

The Contents of a Corporate Governance Report

Governance reports offer detailed accounts of an organization’s progress on particular compliance initiatives or, taken collectively, can provide a broad summary of your company’s compliance efforts.

Also called the annual corporate report, a corporate governance report includes a statement of corporate governance procedures and compliance, information on board composition, statements on the company’s performance, and information about compliance and conformance with best practices for good corporate governance.

1. Statements of disclosure of governance procedures and compliance: The corporate report should include a statement of disclosure of the company’s governance procedures and compliance. It should also disclose the principles and codes that guide the company’s procedures. Disclosure statements usually detail the distribution of powers between the board chair and the CEO. Best practices in today’s marketplace discourage the same individual from serving as CEO and board chair.
2. Board composition: The average size of corporate boards is 9.2 directors. The ideal size of a corporate board is seven to 11 members. Best practices for good corporate governance recommend that boards strive for a mix of board directors in competencies, age, gender, profession, independence and diversity. There should also be a mix of executive and independent directors, with the majority being independent directors. Corporate governance reporting should disclose the regularity and frequency of board meetings.
3. Board roles and responsibilities: The corporate governance report should contain a section that lists the powers, functions, roles and responsibilities of board directors. The report includes information about committees, sub-committees, and any delegated powers and duties. This section of the report should consist of conformance and transformative functions.
4. Board succession and evaluation: Shareholders may be particularly interested in reading information about board directors in the corporate governance report. Such information may include the company’s procedures for appointing directors, board development, succession planning and remuneration by shareholding members.
5. Board performance: Disclosures often describe the corporation’s mechanisms for monitoring the board’s performance, as well as the performance of individual board directors. It also includes information about related party transactions, conflicts of interest and how the board handled them.
6. Business plan and budget: A section of the annual report details the overall organizational plan and how it relates to business plans and budgets, operational and performance measures and a description of risk management and internal control procedures. These reports provide evidence of accountability and transparency and support generally accepted accounting and auditing standards. Sections on accounting also specifically disclose the company’s relationship with internal and external auditors.
7. Communications and compliance: Disclosure statements also cover such issues as communications with shareholders and stakeholders, legal compliance, and codes of conduct for the board, CEO, management and staff.
8. Performance forecasts: Statements usually detail the nature of the business and its future prospects. Shareholders are interested in knowing the company’s outlook for growth, sustainability and innovation and how the corporation plans to factor future market trends into its strategic planning.

Best Practices of Corporate Governance Reporting

Corporate governance reports should be updated at least annually. But boards shouldn’t limit reviews to only once per year. A thorough corporate governance report is the product of effective day-to-day practices that are continuously reviewed and disclosed.

“Board members frequently receive surface-level data, such as the number of whistleblowing reports, with little context,” says Pav Gill, CEO of Confide. “Always dig deeper. For instance, three reports in a quarter may sound like a low figure, but if all those reports involve the same individual, that’s a red flag worth investigating.”

To produce effective governance reports, boards should adopt these best practices:

• Hold regular meetings: Regular meetings keep the board and other shareholders engaged in company activities. This is an important – if obvious – principle in good governance, as it empowers all relevant parties to take part in furthering ethical business practices.
• Practice transparency: Corporate governance reporting relies on transparency. Boards should practice this transparency in reports and everything they do. Ideally, boards will report information as it becomes available and explain the rationale behind key decisions like board compensation.
• Conduct annual performance reviews: Regular board reviews are a chance to collect feedback from internal stakeholders and external shareholders. This can be a critical inflection point for boards to continue effective work or pivot approaches that aren’t meeting company or regulatory expectations. It’s also a key governance practice that can bolster the contents of the corporate governance report.
• Adopt ongoing reporting: Not all decisions or practices will perform as expected. Ongoing reporting on key insights allows boards to change course as needed, whether amending governance practices or making different decisions for the business’s future. Corporate governance reporting can tap into these reports, offering deeper insights into the board’s year-long performance.
• Establish clear data ownership: Define who is responsible for each category of governance data. Without clear ownership, information becomes fragmented across departments, leading to inconsistent or incomplete reports.
• Centralize governance data: Organizations managing multiple entities or jurisdictions need a single source of truth for governance information. When data is scattered across spreadsheets, emails and separate systems, producing accurate reports becomes time-consuming and error-prone.
• Utilize technology. Corporate governance reporting adds another layer to good governance. It compels boards to not only define the governance practices they follow but also to report on how successful those practices are. Technology can help boards automate routine tasks, centralize data and provide insight into multiple entities. Beware of free technology, though, as it likely won’t provide all the features thorough reporting requires.

AI Use for Corporate Governance Reporting

For organizations managing governance reporting across multiple entities and jurisdictions, manual processes create inherent risk. Spreadsheet-based tracking, email-driven data collection and document-based reporting leave gaps that compromise accuracy — often discovered only during audits or regulatory examinations.

Purpose-built governance platforms like Diligent eliminate this fragmentation, transforming reactive compliance reporting into proactive governance excellence.

The Diligent One Platform unifies governance, risk and compliance functions into a single connected infrastructure, reducing the silos that allow reporting gaps to go undetected. Within the platform, multiple solutions directly address the challenges that undermine governance reporting quality:

Diligent Entities

Diligent Entities serves as the system of record for corporate governance data, providing AI-enhanced entity management that transforms reporting from a manual burden into a strategic function.

• AI-powered assistance provides instant answers on ownership structures, directors and filing requirements via chat in Diligent or Microsoft Teams – eliminating hours of manual data searches across spreadsheets and emails.
• Document automation uses AI to import, populate, summarize and translate key governance documents, ensuring consistency across entities and jurisdictions while reducing manual data entry errors.
• Visual reporting generates AI-powered org charts and compliance reports automatically, providing the accurate visualizations that stakeholders and regulators expect.
• Compliance workflows track tasks, manage reviews and file with regulators across jurisdictions, with automated deadline alerts preventing missed filings.

“Diligent is the legal reference tool of our group: exhaustive, up-to-date and reliable,” says Anja Wittke, Senior Legal Counsel at Safran, which manages several hundred subsidiaries worldwide. “We can generate tailored reports on our entities — and those reports are simple to produce.”

Diligent Boards

Diligent Boards streamlines board governance workflows and ensures the accuracy of materials that feed into governance reporting:

• Smart Builder synthesizes raw information into professional board materials with one click, reducing board prep time by 80% while ensuring consistent, high-quality documentation that supports governance disclosures.
• Smart Risk Scanner identifies risky language and legal red flags before documents reach the board, helping organizations catch compliance issues during preparation rather than discovering problems during audits.
• SmartPrep generates pointed discussion questions by topic with citations, ensuring directors arrive prepared with strategic questions that surface governance priorities requiring board attention.

These AI capabilities ensure that the board deliberations and decisions documented in governance reports reflect thorough oversight and informed decision-making — exactly what regulators and stakeholders scrutinize.

Whether you’re producing annual governance reports, responding to regulatory examinations or demonstrating compliance to investors, integrated governance technology provides the accuracy and efficiency that manual processes cannot match.

Schedule a demo with us, the exclusive reseller of Diligent in Africa, to see how Diligent helps organizations transform governance reporting from a compliance burden into a strategic advantage.

FAQs on Governance Reporting