CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : social investment, CSR

Case Study on Responsible Business Competition

ulrikehaug — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Allow me to draw your attention to our latest Case Study about the Responsible Business Competition, which we every year with Junior Achievement Young Enterprise Europe.

The latest addition to the competition is a new application on Facebook, the ‘Responsible Business Challenge’, which invites students up to the age of 25 to submit their ideas on what a responsible business could look like in the year 2020. You can vote for and comment on the ideas that have been submitted, even if you’re older than 25. Log on now and check out the application!

Ulrike Haug

Russian students win HP JA Global Business Challenge Award

jeanne2007 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:38:00 GMT

Wow! Nearly 1000 students participated in this year`s JA Global Business Challenge and eight teams made it to the final. In the end, the Russian Team Topol-M won the prestigious award, which included a cash prize of US $3,000. Second place was awarded to Team 4 Life from Kazakhstan and Team Kiki Phi from China came in third. Congratulations to all of you!

The HP Global Business Challenge is a business simulation game devised by Junior Achievement which has been supported by HP over the last years. It is a global competition, in which student teams from secondary schools and universities run virtual corporations. The challenge is based on an online programme, where the students have to make specific business decisions for their companies. The aim is that the students acquire business knowledge and skills and understand the real effect of the decisions that they make.

For more information about this year´s HP Global Business Challenge Award, please read this article or go to the HP Global Business Challenge information website.

Jeannette Weisschuh

Winners of 2009 Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award announced

ulrikehaug — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:41:00 GMT

You might have seen my earlier blog entries about our support for the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award and the video produced by WWF to support the award. Today, I am pleased to share with you the names of the winners of the essay competition!

First place went to Jonathan Alexander from the University of Bath, second was awarded to Luc Petit from Ashridge Business School and Srikanth Madani from the University of St. Gallen came third. They were awarded their prizes (EUR 7,000; EUR 5,000 and EUR 3,000 respectively plus career advice from Spencer Stuart) on Monday at the Swedish EU Presidency Conference called ‘Eco-efficient Economy – Towards Innovative and Sustainable Competitiveness’.

If you want to learn more about the winners and the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award, which was supported by HP, EABIS and WWF, you can listen to a podcast with Matthew Gitsham from Ashridge Business School and Jonathan and Srikanth or read our feature story.

If you’d like to read the 3,000 word essays by Jonathan, Luc and Srikanth, you can also download the Award Publication, which includes all the shortlisted essays.

Ulrike Haug

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.

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

New Podcast: Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO talks about partnership on ‘brain drain’

ulrikehaug — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:24:00 GMT

I’d like to invite you to listen to our latest CSR podcast with Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO. Stamenka works in UNESCO’s Division of Higher Education where she is Chief of the Section for Reform, Innovation and Quality Assurance. She has been involved in the UNESCO/HP private public partnership since 2003, when we launched a pilot programme that focuses on alleviating ‘brain drain’ in South East Europe.

Through this initiative, HP and UNESCO have helped universities in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia to connect to international research networks with the help of grid-technology. This has allowed the students and faculty to participate in world-class research without having to leave their countries.

I recently met Stamenka at a project meeting where we discussed the extension of our African pilot initiative (which followed the South East Europe project in 2006) to more universities in Africa and the Arab States this year. Not having been with HP during the time of the South East Europe project, I enjoyed learning from Stamenka what worked in this initial project and what didn’t.

Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think about our initiative to connect universities with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies.

Ulrike Haug CSR Stakeholder Programmes

Fight social and environmental exclusion: The e-inclusion Ministerial Conference

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:11:00 GMT

At the beginning of December I had the opportunity to participate in the e-inclusion Ministerial and Expo in Vienna, where HP was one of the main sponsors. HP presented our latest accessibility products and showed some great solutions on web accessibility. We integrate accessibility into our HP products and website development process in order to improve user experience. This is accomplished by buttons identified by touch, ports and switches positioned within easy reach and also large adjustable displays.

The event is organized on an annual basis by the European Commission. This year there were 90 exhibition stands, more than 130 speakers and nearly 1500 delegates who all talked about or presented their approach on how information and communication technologies can fight social and economic exclusion.

The conference focused on bringing together many actors of civil society, the economy and the government to exchange their knowledge and best practices, to honour best practices (e-inclusion awards) and to create a discussion forum about different initiatives and the way forward. The exhibition area constituted a great pool of existing approaches and ideas and it was exciting to see what’s already out there.

This is the second year that we have participated in this event. We had one exhibition stand where I presented our GET-IT programme, which aims at fostering entrepreneurship among young graduates aged between 16-25 in Europe, Middle East and Africa. I presented details on our newly launched GET-IT City portal, which allows us to reach students beyond the classroom. The portal gives students access to training and enables them to receive useful tips for establishing an enterprise. Students can learn IT and important business skills in an entertaining way, with online games and videos. Click here to get your own impression about GET-IT City and let me know what you think.

In addition to our exhibition stand, the lead for our organization, Gabriele Zedlmayer, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Global Citizenship, Hewlett Packard, Europe, Middle East and Africa, delivered a keynote speech about digital literacy. Gabi made it clear that technology access is a key factor in bridging the digital divide. But access is not enough: eSkills are needed to participate in the information society.

I really enjoyed some very fruitful conversations with many important HP stakeholders. Through these discussions I gleaned more ideas on how we can make our social investments even more relevant to society.

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investment and Economic Development

Alleviate Brain Drain in Africa

jeanne2007 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:59:00 GMT

I would just like to link to an interesting article which provides a good overview of the project “Piloting solutions for reversing brain drain into brain gain for Africa” which is a cooperative project of UNESCO and HP to reduce brain drain in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe. To read the article, click here. Some time ago, my colleague Arnaud wrote a blog entry about the project; click here to read his entry.

Enjoy reading,

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

GET-IT – let’s walk the talk

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:27:00 GMT

I am at Brussels airport, flying home after our first annual GET-IT Conference, which was themed around “e-skills development for young entrepreneurs” and I am still very thrilled and excited about the 2 days we have spent together. The event took place at the Brussels HP office on September 18-19.

As you probably remember from my earlier blog entries, our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) is designed for under - or unemployed youth (aged 16-25) in underserved communities. We want to develop their IT and business skills so that they become more qualified for employment and better placed to create their own business.

We decided to hold a conference for our GET-IT network to bring them together from around Europe, Middle East and Africa, to foster knowledge exchange and best practise sharing amongst the group and discuss together how to grow GET-IT further in the most meaningful way.

Prior to the conference, we requested feedback from our network and results from our first year show that overall, our 70 GET-IT partners trained over 8300 young graduates and around 40% found a job after having attendend the courses. Wow, I can only say – great results, if you ask me!

During the conference we had a great mix of GET-IT centers, who have joined the network in 2007, when we launched our social flagship programme, but also centers that joined the network this year. In total GET-IT centers from more than 20 countries participated. We had young entrepreneurs, who attended the GET-IT training, who are the living example that the training works. They were able to launch successful businesses, created jobs for others and are even expanding their operations internationally now. Watch our newly launched GET-IT video, which is posted on our GET-IT website http://www.graduate-training-through-it.net/. Overall we had 41 partipants from 20 countries.

I also learned a lot in the workshop sessions, where we brainstormed about how to increase the impact of the training. This session was very benefical as we are always aiming at developing this programme further for the best local impact. But we also heard very intersting perspectives from the European Commission officials, who discuss the crucial role of e-skills and competences for Europe’s future as well as best practises from our highly valued partners of HP like JA-YE that discussed how the GET-IT curriculum helps advance their existing graduate programmes.

We heard from UNIDO, with whom we formed a partnership to strengthen the GET-IT programme in Africa, that some ICT students have not gotten the chance to be in front of a personal computer for 3 years! It is time to change that!

But clearly, one of the highlights was to hear from the GET-IT centers themselves, how they address entrepreneurship skill training. Great best practise sharing. And it is rewarding to see that GET-IT is so modular, that it adds value to the economic development in each country. We are currently running the programme in 25 countries with 70 partners.

The success of this conference supports us in our goal to increase the GET-IT network further. We want to establish 30 additional GET-IT centres and reach more than 500,000 students in total by 2010 through our GET IT centre network. I know it sounds like a high goal but only high goals enable you to stretch and go even further. I guess it is like chocolate: if you had one piece you want more and more.

To reach as many students as possible with GET-IT have been working on a web portal and presented the BETA version to the conference participants. The portal enables even those students who cannot access a GET-IT centre to still benefit from the programme through various features like the online game or video clips. I am particularly excited about this web portal because it allows us to reach more students in need for entrepreneurship skills. And I am proud to be part of this programme.

Conference participants welcomed the portal and showed tremendous interest in it. We will have a lot of partners testing it now and we hope to get valuable feedback to further advance the game. I must admit that I am a little bit jealous that such entertaining education tools have not existed when I was a graduate. It is amazing how much easier it seems to be for young people to pick up basic business and entrepreneurship principles through such tools.

And last but not least, I am particularly proud about our participants’and partners’ feedback that HP walks the talk with its strong social investment strategy and programmes.

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA

“Win-win” situation: sharing social investment experience between EMEA and Asia Pacific

BlogArchive — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:18:00 GMT

Today I am reporting on a fantastic opportunity that was offered to me and one of my American colleagues. As part of the career development programme at HP, HP offers employees to take on “stretch assignments”. These are projects which offer additional experience and provide new insights and learning opportunities by taking HP employees beyond their current responsibilities and skills. I have been offered the opportunity to manage one of HP’s major social investment flagship programmes in the Asia Pacific region. The programme focuses on Microenterprise Development. I will manage it remotely from Europe while my American colleague stays in Singapore for 2 months to manage the day-to-day work for social investments.

As part of this incremental assignment, we went to Singapore for a week at the beginning of this month to participate in hand over meetings from my colleague, who has managed the programme until now. We will be supporting the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region until a permanent replacement for my colleague has been found.

I met with all HP country teams, from Australia, Japan, China, India, Thailand and many other Asian countries. I also talked to our external Centres of Excellence in Thailand and China. The experience has been fantastic so far and it has already been a great learning opportunity for me to understand the socio-economic needs of those local markets.

Whilst I can clearly see that the programmes HP offers are relevant across the globe, each country/region has its specific societal needs. It is important that our social investment programmes focus on those issues that are relevant on the local level. A one size fits all strategy is just not suitable. I share this valuable additional regional experience with my colleagues worldwide as we are currently defining our strategy for the next years.

The programme I am now managing in APJ promotes economic development by providing HP technology and training to non-profit organizations that use technology to bolster job skills, enhance employability and foster entrepreneurship. My colleague, who managed social investments in the past already did a great job in establishing this programme last year and I aim at developing the project in the following ways:

• Increase number of Microenterprise Development Centres from 17 to 35
• Deploy three Train the Trainer modules through our partner Micro-Enterprise-Acceleration Institute (MEA-I)
• Train a minimum of 400 entrepreneurs on the Microenterprise Acceleration curriculum
• Establish three Enterprise Leadership Centres

I am pleased to have the opportunity to help HP APJ to contribute to improving economic viability and quality of life for individuals and communities around the world through investments of HP resources and technology that support economic development, educational opportunity and environmental sustainability.

The economic development programme in APJ resembles our approach to entrepreneurship and education in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). I have been responsible for social investment in EMEA since 2006. During that time, we have focused heavily on Entrepreneurship skills training. So far, we deployed 44 MAP (Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Programme) centres and have advanced the programme further to address the high youth unemployment (17% in 2006 in the EU) with GET-IT (Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT). We have opened 35 GET-IT centres in 19 countries in 2007 and held three Master Training sessions in Europe, Africa and Russia. This year, we will be building up the network to 70 GET-IT centres in more than 25 countries.

Due to the synergies between the economic development programme in APJ and our entrepreneurship and education programmes in EMEA, my stretch assignment to AJP constitutes a clear win-win situation: I can contribute through my expertise in the Microenterprise skills development, which is very beneficial as we are growing the programme in 10 Asian countries (China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Singapore). And I myself will learn a lot about this fascinating and fast growing region as well as their societal needs and I will definitely use my experiences from APJ for my continuing social investment work in EMEA.

I would like to thank the regional and global management for this phenomenal development opportunity and I can only recommend for my other HP colleagues to explore “stretch assignments” as opportunities for growth. I am glad I am working for a company that has the capabilities to offer such type of assignments and opportunities to their workforce.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA

In the photo below you can see Andrea Gonzales, Rita Sully and me (from left to right)

New podcast: Alleviating brain drain

BlogArchive — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:29:00 GMT

We recently published anew podcast on our Brain Drain projects with UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural organizations). We partner with UNESCO to reduce the emigration of trained and talented people (students, academics, professionals) to other countries by providing grid computing technology so that universities can easily connect among each other.

In 2002 we launched the project: Alleviating Brain Drain in South East Europe and in 2006 the second brain drain project “Reversing brain drain into brain gain in Africa” was launched. Here are the latest news regarding our Brain Drain Project in Africa:

March 2008: we organized a training for the 5 selected universities. The workshop took place at the HP learning center in Johannesburg and had 2 main objectives: to train the University representantive on how to install and manage HP servers and to give them an overview of GRID, and gLite Grid middleware. For this second part of the training, we were supported by experts from CERN-EGEE and INFN at the Cagliary University, Italy.

I also met with representatives of CHPC (Hight Performance Computing Center) in Cape Town to check with them how the RSA national grid could join our grid project. We are hoping that South Africa can become a best practice centre in Africa for Grid computing and will be able to start offering support for extending Grid computing networks and expertise in other African countries.

For initial discussions on that, I met Bruce Becker from INFN/ CERN – EGEE who is in charge of coordinating the creation of the South African National Grid.

Arnaud Pierson, EMEA Strategic Business Programme Manager, HP University Relations