CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : Web 2.0

Web 2.0 and CSR

jeanne2007 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:41:00 GMT

Some pretty cool ways are emerging within social media to engage stakeholders in dialogue and to create innovative solutions. A couple of months ago James Farrar summarised this nicely in the article ‘How web 2.0 can revolutiontise corporate responsibility.’ He said:

"A decade ago, if you brought together a company, an activist non-governmental organisation (NGO) and a government agency, you were guaranteed to create tension. Today, these oddly matched partners generate innovation out of positive, creative tension. Web 2.0 platforms make it easier to build such diverse communities that use different experience and perspective to create innovative solutions." Web 2.0 also allows a company to put reporting information online and have a dialogue about it with the public.

There is huge potential for Web 2.0 to support the responsible performance of a company, to increase transparency and to stimulate innovation in very creative ways. Yes, best practices are out there, but a lot has not even been explored yet. There is huge potential. Wow - what exciting times!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

GET-IT programme extended to e-learning portal and new centres

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:05:00 GMT

Today, we officially launched the latest component of our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) programme, which is a web portal called GET-IT City! We also announced our 2009 plans to extend the programme to an additional 30 training centres in Africa, the Middle East and Russia to help address the high levels of youth unemployment in these markets.

If you have followed our latest blog entries you will know that GET-IT is one of our major social investment flagship programmes in EMEA. Briefly, GET-IT aims to help young people enter into professional life and, in many cases, it helps them launch their own businesses. Collectively, this helps to reduce youth unemployment. Working with our non-profit partners, we have trained 8,755 students since launching the programme in 2007. Approximately 60 per cent of students attending the GET-IT training have been able to find a job as a result.

Our newly launched virtual city provides young unemployed people and graduates with a fun way to learn IT and business skills through online games and video clips. You can find out more about the GET-IT City in our interview with Jelena Godjevac, CEO of Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), our partner for the GET-IT programme.

At the moment, we deliver GET-IT training in 70 centres across 25 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and we have another 30 centres in the pipeline. The new centres and online portal combined will serve to enhance those trainings, enabling us to reach as many as 500,000 students by 2010. We are also considering to integrate the games from the portal in other initiatives, e.g. our HP Responsible Business Competition, which is another social investment flagship programme developed with JA-YE.

Let me know what you think of the online portal and the games.

Daniela Opp, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA

Today is Blog Action Day

jeanne2007 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:11:00 GMT

Today is Blog Action Day which this year is dedicated to Poverty. Bloggers around the world have signed up to blog about this important and comprehensive topic.

Three bloggers, Collis Ta'eed, Leo Babauta and Cyan Ta'eed, launched Blog Action Day on 15th October 2007. Last year’s theme was on The Environment and we participated with our own blog entry.

We want to join Blog Action Day again this year, together with around 9,000 bloggers who have already signed up.

I looked up a few statistics to prepare for our Blog Action Day entry and found some rather depressing facts.

Poverty Facts and Stats: Did you know that three billion people live with less than two dollars a day; or that nearly a billion who entered the 21st century are unable to read a book or sign their names?

But what is poverty? Poverty has many aspects. It means to have no or not much money; it means not to have shelter; it means hunger; it means unemployment… Poverty is powerlessness. It particularly constitutes a threat in developing countries.

So what can we do? The United Nations Millennium Campaign to end poverty by 2015 has set its goal to end poverty in the next seven years. This means to end hunger, enable children to receive education, support gender equality, promote child and maternal health, combat HIV and similar diseases and promote environmental sustainability.

As the leading Information Technology (IT) corporation in the world, we at HP try to combat poverty with the help of our core competencies. i.e. by providing knowledge, skills and our technology.

According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, the average global unemployment rate of people aged 16-24 is 14%. It is significantly higher in regions such as North Africa (30%) and the Middle East (23%). Did you know that, even though unemployed or low income earners might have access to a computer, they do not know how to use it? This is also a form of poverty that we try to address, for example, through our flagship programme Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT).

I think that micro-enterprise development is one of the most effective ways of creating jobs and addressing poverty. With GET-IT, we foster business development by providing young people with IT skills so that they can enter business life more easily and even start their own business. GET-IT creates entrepreneurs and addresses problems of unemployment and low economic growth.

Let me share with you some encouraging success stories of GET-IT: In Russia, 51% of women participating in GET-IT trainings said that they have improved their social status through the programme. 11% of those have found a job. I was delighted when I heard about that.

We also work closely with local non-governmental organisations to set up GET-IT centres. NGO representatives are trained by our partner MEA-I so that they can then train young graduates. We know very well that both the education deficit and poverty rate in African countries are quite high and so we have also established a partnership with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) and plan to open more GET-IT training centres in African countries in the future.

Poverty constitutes a global issue which clearly cannot be healed by one player alone. Instead, it is up to everyone of us to consider what he or she can do to improve the situation and to act accordingly. I think that the theme of poverty is great as a Blog Action Day topic. We need to continuously raise awareness and show how small and big things can be achieved. I cannot wait to read some entries of other Blog Action Day participants.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Web 2.0 and CSR - the excitment has just begun

jeanne2007 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:08:00 GMT

I attended a pretty exciting workshop on CSR and Web 2.0 during SAP´s Sapphire event at the end of May in Berlin. Even if the CSR community and especially companies are only just beginning to make active use of social media, there are great opportunities ahead.

Especially for a more regular stakeholder dialogue Web 2.0 offers strong advantages to help to increase transparency into a company’s CSR strategy and related programmes. James Governor from open-source analyst firm Redmonk has an interesting view on this. Redmonk decided to go green a while ago by setting up a “green” arm to their open source analyst business. According to James, “With the help of Web 2.0, CSR is becoming a window itself - an important gateway between the business and us: individuals, customers and stakeholders." Wow, what a statement!

Another very true comment was made by Dennis Howlett from ZDNet, encouraging companies to include social media more actively into their communication strategy "There is nothing to fear except you have something to hide". Yes, how true even if it is of course important to have tools to measure the success of communication campaigns in place. And this is currently obviously still an area to be further explored in the Web 2.0 space.

James Farrar, VP for CSR at SAP who hosted the workshop even believes that web 2.0 could redefine CSR reporting making it much more dynamic considering stakeholder views from online communities etc. The more you think about the great potential which lies behind the better usage of web 2.0 in the CSR space the more exciting it gets.

And here is another piece of advice from Dennis Howlett "You are not going to get it right. You are going to make mistakes. But there is only one way - go for it!"

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Corporate Affairs, HP EMEA