Vodafone Publishes Annual Group Sustainability Report

Vodafone - one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies - which provides a wide range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications, has published its 2015 Group Sustainability Report.

The report demonstrates the ways in which Vodafone’s core business – connecting people and businesses – has reshaped how 446m customers in 26 countries communicate, share, create, learn and grow and thus realise their individual and collective potential.

Focusing its efforts into three main sections –Transformational Solutions, Environment and Operating Responsibly – the report highlights how Vodafone’s network, products and services improve people’s livelihoods and quality of life. The report also looks at the way in which Vodafone works to help consumers, governments and businesses tackle some of the most significant challenges they face – from energy efficiency and emissions, to a lack of access to education, healthcare and financial services.

The report showcases a number of initiatives including Vodafone’s:

• new global maternity policy which will mean that a mother working for Vodacom Mozambique will benefit from the same support as that offered to her peers in Europe
• new goal to use its technologies to help business and enterprise customers reduce their carbon emissions by twice the amount of CO2e generated by Vodafone's own business by 2018
• mobile money transfer service, M-Pesa, used actively by nearly 20m people to transfer money, receive salary payments, save and pay for goods and services, as well as enabling access to life-saving medical treatment, education and agricultural services
• Machine-to-Machine (M2M) solutions, which enable their customers to operate more efficiently and reduce their carbon footprint. In 2014, these solutions delivered total carbon savings of 3.5m tonnes of CO2e, almost a million tonnes higher than Vodafone’s own total emissions
• work with the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue on Freedom and Privacy of Expression – which it chaired in 2015 – which continues to work in collaboration with the Global Network Initiative to address the issues of privacy and freedom of expression as they relate to the telecommunications sector
• commitment to transparency as evidenced by their Law Enforcement Disclosure and Tax and Total Economic Contribution reports which include country-by-country analyses of activities in each of their countries of operation
• use of mobile technology to enable the delivery of direct, anonymous feedback from employees on their working conditions in order to help identify areas for improvement
• Instant Network schools programme, from the Vodafone Foundation, which saw the launch of the Instant Classroom initiative, a digital ‘school in a box’ that can be set up within minutes and which connects teachers and children to online resources even at the most poorly resourced refugee camps. Over 26,400 students and 500 teachers in Africa now benefit from Instant Network classrooms and in the next two years the programme aims to reach 60,000 students

Click here to view their new report.