Risk management is integral to our operations, enabling agility, adaptability and alignment with our strategic priorities.
Our approach
MTN integrates risk management across all levels of the Group, ensuring proactive identification, assessment and mitigation of risks and opportunities that can potentially impact our business. We cultivate a risk-aware culture, leveraging a combination of top-down governance, bottom-up risk identification, and continuous horizon scanning for emerging risks.
Our structured approach prioritises risks based on their likelihood, impact and the effectiveness of existing controls. This ensures focus on the most material threats while enabling a swift response to evolving challenges.
The MTN Board and its committees provide rigorous oversight of our risk framework, working closely with management to ensure its effectiveness. At the Opco level, risk management is reinforced through executive committees and audit and risk committees, ensuring alignment with local market dynamics while maintaining a cohesive Group-wide strategy.
Identifies strategic-level risks
and cascades these downwards
Enables top management to
make better risk-based decisions
Identifies risks at a process,
functional operational level
Drives robust risk management
across the enterprise
Supports our proactive strategy focused on continuously identifying and assessing new risks before they fully materialise, helping MTN to stay ahead of potential threats and adapt accordingly.
Stress testing + scenario planning
Combined assurance
Business resilience strategies
Compliance management
Principal risk universe and risk appetite
A structured principal risk universe is central to our ERM approach. It establishes a consistent, two-tiered risk categorisation framework, ensuring comprehensive risk mapping across all Opcos. Bottom-up integration fosters alignment and uniformity, while a top-down view ensures completeness in risk identification. As our business evolves, the risk universe is continuously refined to reflect shifts in strategy, structure and operations.
Our ERM framework translates risk appetite into actionable risk preferences for each principal risk. By defining clear thresholds and KRIs, we align risk-taking with business objectives, ensuring mitigation efforts and resource allocation are targeted and effective.
Risk appetite and tolerance thresholds are embedded within business planning and decision-making, enabling us to navigate an increasingly complex landscape with clarity and control. This structured approach ensures that risk exposure remains within defined preferences while driving strategic execution in a dynamic operating environment.
We continue to strengthen our business resilience, ensuring operational continuity in a dynamic risk environment. Our ISO 22301 certification remains a key benchmark, supported by crisis simulations, enhanced continuity planning and structured resilience assessments.
Key improvements include refined response strategies, expanded risk horizon scanning and strengthened data protection. Investments in alternative energy solutions and infrastructure redundancy help mitigate disruptions, while enhanced scenario planning and early threat detection ensure proactive risk management. By embedding resilience into our operations, we enhance our agility, continuity and long-term sustainability.
We continue to strengthen our compliance framework, ensuring alignment with evolving regulatory landscapes and business imperatives. Our risk-based compliance approach prioritises proactive monitoring, testing and enhancement of internal controls to maintain a robust and agile compliance environment across the Group.
Key advancements include the implementation of control improvement initiatives, enhancing governance structures and embedding compliance maturity. Through our Project Guardian, we have reinforced data privacy and protection protocols, integrating stringent safeguards into our operations. Our business partner and trade compliance processes have also been enhanced, ensuring greater due diligence, adherence to sanctions regulations and responsible partner management.
Additionally, we have refined our compliance methodologies, strengthened monitoring tools and aligned compliance metrics with Group risk management frameworks.
MTN employs a combined assurance approach to enhance the effectiveness of risk management, governance and control oversight.
By integrating assurance efforts across internal and external providers, we ensure comprehensive coverage of key risks while validating that controls are in place and operating within defined risk thresholds. This approach strengthens accountability, co-ordination and risk mitigation across the Group.
We have strengthened our approach to stress and shock scenario analysis, ensuring greater adaptability to emerging risks. Our framework integrates stress testing, reverse stress testing, and catastrophic scenario analysis to assess the potential impact of extreme events on MTN's financial and operational stability.
Stress testing is applied across budgeting, liquidity management, and capital planning at both the Opco and Group levels. We assess various scenarios – including currency devaluation, inflationary pressures, regulatory shifts and funding constraints – to refine risk mitigation strategies.
Reverse stress testing helps identify conditions that could lead to severe financial strain, cash flow pressures, or operational disruptions, ensuring proactive risk responses. Additionally, catastrophic scenario analysis considers high-impact risks such as major cyber-attacks, network infrastructure failures, shifts in market dynamics and geopolitical disruptions to inform crisis preparedness and resilience planning.
By embedding these methodologies, we enhance decision-making, improve financial and operational resilience, and ensure MTN remains well positioned to navigate an evolving risk landscape.
