CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : entrepreneurship

GET-IT Networking conference: Immersive Learning!

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:24:00 GMT

This was just so amazing and very rewarding. On 16 and 17 October we held our second GET-IT networking conference in Cairo, Egypt. The conference was hosted by the Ministry of ICT in the ‘smart village’. We had representatives from 80 GET-IT centres, government organisations and educational institutions, as well as real entrepreneurs - our success stories - and they came from about 20 EMEA countries. We all joined hands during the conference and made the theme of the conference – Immersive Learning – a reality.

What did we do? The aim of the conference was to bring together delegates from our GET-IT centres, leaders from education and government and HP management, to exchange experiences, share best practices and get the latest updates on our GET-IT programme. This conference enabled participants to grow their own GET-IT network and learn from each other.

A real highlight for me was to see what GET-IT can achieve when we all come together and the impact that our GET-IT training clearly has on students and the local economy. Another highlight was hearing from entrepreneurs who spoke about how they were able to build their business or improve their economic situation as a result of their GET-IT training.

For instance, we heard from Aissatel Amet from France. She said that she had wanted to establish her own business as a web designer but she lacked sufficient knowledge in Excel programming and numbers. Her GET-IT training helped her to develop her knowledge and ability and she has now successfully launched her own business. These are moments that warm your heart.

The huge amount of work that went into organising this event was also a big highlight for me. It was clearly evident that the Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), the Suzanne Mubarak Peace Movement Foundation (one of our GET-IT partners in Egypt), United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and of course HP really worked so hard and so well together. It was amazing. In addition to sharing experiences and best practice, we also provided our delegates and NGO partners with the latest developments of the GET-IT programme, specifically focusing on our online extension of the programme.

For example, in future the GET-IT centres will have the opportunity to get engaged in curriculum developments online and will be able to suggest topics of interest. Also, we have just launched our second serious game on the online GET-IT City platform. It is called GET-IT Blossom and it represents an extension of our existing online training platform GET-IT City.

GET-IT Blossom is an interactive training programme where the player is a manager of a flower business. The player has to make sure that his customers are happy, the turnover increases and the plantation and office-related work are run successfully.

It was so motivating and rewarding to see how the centres shared their experiences and engaged so well in ‘immersive learning’. To see how GET-IT helps students on a local level makes me feel very strong about our programme and I can’t wait to grow the scope and impact of this programme even further. We have made a lot of contacts within the centres and a number of governments are now really interested in growing GET-IT.

As you will remember from earlier blogs, GET-IT focuses a lot on online learning. This is why we made sure that the conference could also be accessed online to enable people who could not attend the conference in Cairo to participate from their own vantage point. They could do this, for instance, via our GET-IT Facebook page or our Twitter page and of course our GET-IT Homepage. You can find more information about the conference on all of those pages.

I would like to finish my blog entry by extending a big thank you to everyone who participated in the conference. Thank you for all of your contributions, your trust and your work. Let me also thank our partners, the Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute for all their hard work in helping to organise the conference, as well as to the Ministry of ICT and the Suzanne Mubarak Women´s International Peace Movement for hosting us and for their support both before and during the event. Chapeau!

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investment, EMEA

PS: you can find recent news about GET-IT on our homepage, our video or latest case study.

Nigerian team selected as winners of HP Responsible Ideas Contest in Africa

ulrikehaug — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:41:00 GMT

You might remember previous blog entries about the 2009 Responsible Business Competition that we’re running with Junior Achievement (JA) Africa.

The latest milestone of this initiative is the selection of the winner of the African Responsible Ideas Contest, which took place in September. I’m pleased to tell you that the student team Black Diamond from Nigeria won first prize!

I was one of the panel of HP experts responsible for judging the finalists from the three participating countries (we’re running this contest as a pilot in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa this year) and it was a challenge to pick a winner out of all of the inspirational ideas that were submitted. On the panel, we had employees from the participating countries, from the HP CSR team and also two judges who had actually run student companies in the JA programme when they were still in school.

Black Diamond convinced the jury because they combined both social and environmental responsibility in their business idea. They had organised a rock concert in their home town of Lagos and used this event to raise awareness about HIV/Aids. They are also planning to use the proceeds of the event to implement a recycling scheme in their school and eventually their community.

I really enjoyed being on the panel of judges and working with JA in the three countries. It’s encouraging to see the various kinds of entrepreneurship education programmes that they offer to young people. If you know of any entrepreneurship initiatives for young people in Africa, please share them by posting a comment.

Ulrike Haug, CSR Stakeholder Programmes, HP EMEA

Conference on 'Arab Women in Science and Technology' in Dubai

jeanne2007 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:39:00 GMT

It is always very rewarding to get insights into different cultures and to learn from them. Last week I had the opportunity to present at the first women´s conference of the Arab Science and Technology Foundation in Dubai.

The conference should probably be regarded as a historical moment. It was the first time that female researchers from different Arab countries have come together to exchange experiences in professional development and to discuss the most burning issues relating to business success. Even if many women are capable of overcoming cultural, religious and political constraints so that they can pursue their own careers, there is still a long way to go to bringing more women into decision-making positions.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, 60 per cent of students are female, but only 1.3 per cent of women are board members of major companies. What happens to all these highly qualified women when they leave university?!

Looking at the unemployment rates of graduates in the Middle East, the percentage of women is extraordinarily high. So there we are. There is obviously still a barrier to hiring qualified women for respective positions. It is interesting to see that, in Dubai, it is still common practice for job advertisements to state a preference for men. Women don’t even seem to get a chance to apply.

Whilst in Dubai, I had an opportunity to talk to some of our partners from our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training programme, including the Dubai Women´s College. I learned that there seems to be a greater demand for women to be more highly qualified in the use of technology and a greater need to help them set up their own businesses. What an excellent opportunity! I have been very pleased to see that, through our GET-IT programme we can obviously make a good contribution.

Talking to ‘Young Entrepreneurs in Dubai’, an organisation supported by the Dubai government to significantly increase the number of entrepreneurs over the next couple of years, the response has been similar. Jobs that, in the past, were made available by the government will not be funded in a similar way in the future. It seems as though graduates from universities now need to take much more personal responsibility for their future careers. And entrepreneurship is one of the answers - especially for women.

I very much hope that the Arab Science and Technology Foundation will be able to maintain the inspiring momentum of the conference and that they will continue to support women researchers in their career development. The heat is on and congratulations to all women in this region who are already on their way.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Social Investment: What do we do?

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:34:00 GMT

On this blog we always give you updates on our programme achievements. We decided to bring these updates together in a short article, to give you a great overview of our social investment approach and our main programmes. Click here to read the article.

I am looking forward to your comments to our Social Investment approach.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, EMEA

Lithuanian Student Company wins HP Responsible Business Award – my weekend in Rotterdam

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:52:00 GMT

For the fourth consecutive year, we awarded the ‘HP Responsible Business Award’ to a student company in Europe last weekend. This year’s winner is the Lithuanian student team Greblys Company, which won the award for their environmental education offering. Congratulations to the team of five secondary school students!

The HP Responsible Business Award is given to the student company who has proved to be the best at integrating strong financial performance, social responsibility, environmental excellence and innovation into their business plan and operations. The award is part of the HP Responsible Business Competition, an extension of the existing JA-YE Annual Company Programme which gives secondary school students the opportunity to prepare for working life through the experience of running their own company.

My colleagues and I spent this past weekend in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where we formed a special jury to interview this year’s 32 student companies that participated in the JA-YE Annual Company of the Year Competition. These companies are already winners in their own right, because the European Finals of the Company of the Year Programme only invite the national finalists. This year, it was especially difficult for our jury to judge the 32 companies as the majority of them fulfilled the criteria for our award, these being:

Social responsibility: meeting the wider concerns of stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, customers and local communities.
Environmental excellence: preventing pollution, optimising resource efficiency and developing products with minimal environmental impact. Note: This is not just about producing a ‘green’ product. It’s also about how the environmental impact is reduced in operations and during the product lifecycle (from design to manufacturing and end-of-life/recycling).
Innovation and Strong financial performance

So, at the end,it was a tough call and after two days of evaluating company reports, interviews, stage presentations and visiting stands at the fair, the Lithuanian students convinced us of their comprehensive approach that incorporated both social and environmental responsibility.

The team created a book and three computer games which are designed to help young children learn the basic principles of recycling in an easy and enjoyable way. Their products are unique to the Lithuanian market as environmental education through books and online games is unheard of. Greblys also sold the books to the main recycling companies, which then sold or donated them to customers and schools. Make sure you check out their website www.eko.mokinukai.lt. As you can imagine, the team was over the moon, as no Lithuanian team had won a European student company competition before. The team will be rewarded with HP technology.

The HP Responsible Business Competition not only includes this award but it also has an online ideas competition. You may have read the blog from my colleague Ulrike Haug. This year, record-beating results were reached with over 300 students submitting their ideas.

Other elements of the competition include an online certification via the Responsible Business Website and school visits by HP employees. Overall, more than 100,000 students have benefited from the HP Responsible Business Competition since its inception in 2006. This year many HP employees volunteered their time to work with these students and to be present at their schools. This is a great motivational activity that we, as the CSR team, can offer to our em ployees. So really, this is a win-win situation for both HP employees, the students and their teachers.

And just one further point,, I’d like to let you know that our colleagues in North and South America have seen the benefit of this kind of entrepreneurship skills education initiative and they have been deploying this programme in the Americas this year as well.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, EMEA

GET-IT: Africa highlights

Daniela.Opp — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:51:00 GMT

I have already written a couple of entries about our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training in IT (GET-IT) Programme. Since its launch in 2007 we have opened up 100 centres in 30 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa and have already trained more than 43,000 students. We recently published an article about three GET-IT centres in Africa in our Global Citizenship Bulletin. Instead of repeating the article, I would like to encourage you to read it here. It shows you the experiences and impressions of three different NGOs which offer our GET-IT programme. Each one is different, but they all have the same goal: To teach young school leavers and undergraduates business skills with IT. Happy reading.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, 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

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

jeanne2007 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:04:00 GMT

I have invited my colleague Ulrike Haug to share some thoughts around an interesting report she read on social intrapreneurship.

Regards,

Jeannette

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

I am sure all of you have already come across the term “social entrepreneur”. Social entrepreneurs address societal problems and aim at solving them through entrepreneurial business practices. But have you also heard about the “social intrapreneur”? I have to admit I only recently came across that expression in a report by SustainAbility . A social intrapreneur is an employee of a large corporation who uses entrepreneurial principles to address social and environmental challenges. She or he does so by delivering solutions or products that add both value to society as well as to the company’s bottom line.

Both concepts of social entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship really appeal to me. I’ve come across many inpiring examples of social entrepreneurship in the last few years and at HP we have various social investment programmes in place which aim at fostering social entrepreneurs. Just recently we have awarded the Austrian student company Infotainment with the HP Responsible Business Award as the student company integrated social aspects into their business model. The company developed tools to educate 8- to10-year-old students, their parents and teachers on environmental issues such as climate change. I guess you can call them already social entrepreneurs, even at their young age. Well done!

But we need both – social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs. While enabling societal change, social intrapreneurs are also significant for a company’s survival in an environment of rising expectations of the role of business in society. I am convinced that we will see social and environmental innovations play a bigger role for companies in the future and that those companies which foster their social intrapreneurs will be leaders in their industries.

I can think of some examples of social intrapreneurs at HP. For example, the team of HP employees from Hungary that developed a tool that allows customers to monitor and control parameters such as energy use, water consumption and sewage as well as air pollution at production sites or office buildings. The Hungarian team won our internal Sustainable Innovation Competition that we conducted with WWF.

I think it is crucial for us at HP to continue to foster our intrapreneurs and the innovations they bring to the company, and we are currently looking into ways of how we can further increase our support for them.

Have you come across social intrapreneurs in your organisations? I’d really like to hear from you. Just leave a comment.

Kind regards,

Ulrike Haug, CSR Communications