Panel
Making Mandatory Sustainability Disclosure Work for Children’s Rights
ORGANIZED BY
UNICEF
15-Sep
14:15-15:15
Conference Room 2
Across Asia, mandatory sustainability disclosure is reshaping the State duty to protect—but it stays focused on climate while the social pillar remains thin. Gender, safety and labour are making the journey from silence to prescribed indicators. Children haven't. This session asks the regulators who drove that progress: what comes next?
Overview
Under Pillar I of the UN Guiding Principles, the State duty to protect calls for a "smart mix" of measures. Across Asia, one of the fastest-moving is mandatory sustainability disclosure—through instruments such as Malaysia's National Sustainability Reporting Framework, Thailand's One Report, the Philippines' sustainability reporting rules and India's BRSR. Disclosure is where human rights due diligence becomes visible and accountable: what regulators require, companies must show.
Yet evidence from Making Children Count (UNICEF, 2026)—a benchmark of 1,399 listed companies across nine Asian markets against 26 indicators—shows that impacts on the region's children remain inconsistently reported and rarely comparable. This session brings the regulators and exchanges who design these regimes into the Forum's implementation conversation: a dialogue between the BHR community and the market authorities whose rules shape what companies disclose, and therefore what rights-holders, civil society and investors can see and act on.
The timing matters. Asia now accounts for the majority of new mandatory disclosure rules worldwide, with jurisdictions aligning to the ISSB baseline—yet this build-out is heavily weighted toward climate, while the social pillar stays thin, fragmented and largely voluntary. The region's own record proves the model works: board gender diversity, workforce inclusion, occupational health and safety, and labour standards have travelled from silence to prescribed, comparable indicators—because regulators and exchanges required, guided and trained the market to report them.
Children have not yet made that journey. Where a framework names an issue, disclosure follows; where it stays silent, so do companies. For the BHR community, this makes disclosure regulation one of the most practical and underused entry points for advancing the UNGPs at scale: a single well-designed requirement reaches every listed company in a market at once. This session asks the regulators who drove that progress to share what worked—and consider how the same playbook transposes to children's rights.
Why it matters
Disclosure rules are the highest-leverage entry point in the BHR toolkit: one well-designed requirement reaches every listed company in a market at once. Asia is writing these rules now, aligning to the ISSB baseline—but the window is climate-heavy and closing. If children aren't named in the social pillar as it's built out, they'll be structurally invisible in the region's disclosure architecture for years. What gets required gets reported.
Key questions
What made social indicators like gender diversity, OHS and labour standards "stick" in Asian disclosure regimes—was it prescription, guidance, issuer training, or framework iteration—and which of those levers actually moved reporting?
What is the minimum viable intervention that would make child-related impacts visible and comparable— indicators, materiality guidance, other?
What can civil society, workers' organisations and investors currently see and act on—and where does the data still fail them?
Which role should play the regulators, stock exchanges, investors and companies themselves?
Who should attend?
Primary audience: securities regulators, stock exchanges and standard-setters designing sustainability disclosure regimes across Asia, but also BHR practitioners, investors and civil society actors working on corporate sustainability and ESG related themes.
The session is deliberately a meeting point between the rule-makers and the rule-users.
What participants will gain
A clear read on which regulatory levers actually drove social disclosure uptake in the region.
A transferable playbook for moving any under-reported issue from silence to prescribed, comparable indicators.
Evidence from Making Children Count (https://www.unicef.org/asia-pacific/reports/making-children-count-sustainability-reporting-across-emerging-asia) on where the current disclosure architecture leaves children invisible.
A concrete sense of next steps in their own market, and regionally, to keep the social pillar level with climate.
Additional resources
A.K.M. Nurunnabi
Director, Sustainable Finance Department, Bangladesh Bank
Mr. A.K.M. Nurunnabi currently serves as Director of the Sustainable Finance Department of
Bangladesh Bank, where he leads policy development and regulatory initiatives to advance
green, climate and sustainable finance in Bangladesh’s financial sector. His work focuses on
integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into financial
institutions’ business and credit decisions, advancing sustainability and climate-related
financial disclosure, and shaping regulatory frameworks to channel finance towards green,
climate-resilient and sustainable economic activities.
Mr. Nurunnabi has over 23 years of professional experience in central banking, financial-sector
regulation and supervision, foreign exchange regulation, AML-CFT and financial intelligence.
Prior to his current assignment, he served in the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU),
where he worked on financial intelligence analysis and formulation, information exchange with
law-enforcement agencies, inter-agency coordination and financial intelligence cooperation.
He also served in a policy and coordination role relating to stolen asset recovery. These
assignments provided him with extensive experience in strengthening financial integrity,
regulatory coordination and the use of financial-sector information to address financial crime
and related risks.
Mr. Nurunnabi has participated in and represented Bangladesh/Bangladesh Bank in various
international forums, including the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG), the
Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI). He holds
an MBA in Banking and a Master’s in Economics for Professionals from the University of
Dhaka, alongside postgraduate and undergraduate degrees in Geology. He received the
Bangladesh Bank Employee Recognition Award in 2017.
Romain Sibille
Regional Child Rights and Business Manager for Asia and Pacific at UNICEF
Romain Sibille is Regional Child Rights and Business Manager for Asia and Pacific at UNICEF, where he works to change how business ecosystems operate so these respect, protect and promote children's rights.
After a first life in the corporate sector, he has specialized, for the last 14 years, in developing and implementing new models on the intersection between business and social impact. Today he is the focal point for UNICEF’s 36 countries and territories in 22 country offices in Asia and Pacific region, covering more than half the world children population, to which he provides expertise and support to strengthen their collaboration with companies, business chambers, governments, investors, and th broad business ecosystem, within the frameworks of the SDGs, Child Rights and Business Principles, and Shared Value Partnerships.
In his regional role, Romain leads on the areas of institutional and regulatory frameworks on Child Rights and Business, children digital rights, climate change and business, prevention of overweight and obesity, disaster prevention and risk reduction, prevention and reduction of violence against women and children, and promotion of family-friendly workplaces, among others.
Romain holds a master's degree in international business and telecommunications from Institut Mines-Télécom - Business School.
Garima Dadhich
Associate Professor at IICA
Dr. Garima Dadhich is a distinguished Associate Professor at IICA, leading the School of Business Environment, Centre for Business and Human Rights, and the Centre for Responsible Business Advisory. A visionary in corporate sustainability, she has been pivotal in advancing ESG, CSR, and Business & Human Rights initiatives through innovative guidelines and strategic partnerships. An active member of SEBI’s current ESG Standing Advisory Committee (SAC), Member Convenor of IICA-MCA Advisory Committee & Core Working Group on Strengthening Disclosures under Companies Act and ESG, and Member Convenor of MCA High Level Advisory Committee on Ease of Doing Business. She also mentors top government officials at LBSNAA Mussoorie and corporate leaders. With credentials from ILS Law College, Pune; Queen Mary University of London; Harvard Extension School; and recognition as a Sustainable Finance Analyst by the World Sustainable Finance Institute, She is a certified trainer on "Managing Disputes and Difficult Conversations on the Board" by Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR). She has authored influential works, including Demystifying ESG, Benchmarking ESG & CSR, and CSR Ready Reckoner. Her current areas of interest are Responsible Governance, Business Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Laws.
Jacqueline Liu
Chief Counsel of the Corporate Governance Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Philippines
Atty. Jacqueline Liu is the Chief Counsel of the Corporate Governance Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Philippines. Her work includes development of corporate governance regulations and monitoring of compliance by covered companies. She is a member of the Secretariat team handling the Corporate Governance Working Group of the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum.
Prior to joining the SEC in February 2021, Jac worked for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Commission on Human Rights.
She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Legal Management and a Law Degree from the University of Santo Tomas. She took and passed the Bar Examinations in 2017.