Vodafone 2014 Annual Report Download - page 36

Sustainable business
Contributing to social and
economic improvement
Telecommunications technology has the power to transform people’s lives.
Ensuring that we continue to connect more people to essential services,
while expanding the reach of our network, is the best way we can support
that improvement.
Telecommunications technology can be used to tackle some of the
most pressing challenges faced by society today. Our products and
services provide access to a range of solutions to these challenges
in areas including nancial services, healthcare and education.
We remain determined to continue to contribute to the social and
economic development of all our customers and particularly our
302 million customers who live in emerging markets, while ensuring
we continue to full our strategic business goals.
How we achieve our goals is integral to the long-term success of the
business. We remain fully committed to operating ethically and
responsibly in everything we do. This includes ensuring we respect
our customers’ human rights, improving ethical and environmental
standards in our supply chain and managing our energy use, while
remaining proactive in our response to emerging sustainability risks.
This report highlights our progress in four critical areas.
Connecting people to vital services
Mobile money continues to be a driver of nancial inclusion, offering
people access to payments and nancial services beyond the
reach of traditional institutions. Our platform, M-Pesa, expanded
its geographical reach in 2014, launching recently in Mozambique,
Lesotho, Egypt, Romania and India.
M-Pesa now has 17 million active users who can access a wide range
of services that enhance their ability to improve their livelihoods,
including the ability to pay bills and even be paid their salary via M-Pesa.
A new savings and loan product, launched in conjunction with the
Commercial Bank of Africa, enables M-Pesa users to save and access
loans, often for the very rst time.
The M-Pesa platform supports our efforts in many other areas, including
our aim to increase productivity and improve the lives of 500,000
smallholder farmers in Africa, through the Connected Farmer Alliance
initiative. Our rst formal partnership with Kilombero Plantations
Limited, in Tanzania, tested how mobile technology could support the
Company’s engagement with smallholder rice farmers. We are also
piloting our solution with a dairy cooperative in Kenya, to help them run
more efciently, increasing productivity and incomes for the members
who supply the cooperative with milk.
Protecting our customers’ information
and respecting their privacy
The amount of data and personal information transmitted over our
networks is increasing, as our customers use their mobile and other
connected devices more and more. Our commitment to protect that
information and respect their right to privacy and freedom of expression
remains critical in retaining their trust.
We can only ensure our customers’ privacy if we rst ensure the security
of their information and communications. Cyber security threats
continue to proliferate, so Vodafone’s Global Security Operations Centre
monitors our IT systems 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to anticipate
or detect attacks and minimise their impact.
The issue of government surveillance has come under increased
scrutiny. For the rst time we have published a Law Enforcement
Disclosure report, which sets out our approach to responding to law
enforcement demands for access to customer information, together
with information about intelligence agency and authority demands
on a country-by-country basis, where statistical data can lawfully
be disclosed.
Vodafone is a member of the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue
on Freedom and Privacy of Expression, which in March 2013 launched
a two-year collaboration with the Global Network Initiative (‘GNI’)
and a set of Guiding Principles, which address the issues of privacy and
freedom of expression as they relate to the telecommunications sector.
Supporting ethical practices in the supply chain
We continue to work with our suppliers and others in our industry
to raise ethical, labour and environmental standards in our supply
chain, through an enhanced code of ethical purchasing. In 2014,
we conducted 30 rigorous audits of both new and existing suppliers and
38 through the Joint Audit Co-operation (‘JAC’), in collaboration with
nineother telecommunications operators.
This year, we published our rst Conict Minerals report in response
to US Securities and Exchange Commission requirements. Our policy
requires our suppliers to take steps to ensure that minerals used
to nance conict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘DRC’)
or neighbouring countries do not end up in our products and we are
working through industry initiatives to continue to tackle this issue.
Saving energy and cutting carbon
We are a top-rated global communications service provider for the
machine-to-machine (‘M2M’) industry. Using our M2M solutions helps
our enterprise customers to cut carbon emissions and generate cost
savings. We estimated the carbon savings we deliver for customers from
our M2M products and services, call conferencing and cloud and hosting,
to be a total of 2.29 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (‘CO2e’)
in 2013 – almost equal to our total emissions. By March 2014, we had
contracts to provide nearly 14 million M2M connections with carbon-
reducing potential in smart metering, eet management and logistics.
Though we continue to extend the reach of our network to more
customers, who are using increasing amounts of data, our own carbon
footprint has remained almost stable and we remain committed
to reduce it as far as possible through energy efciency measures.
The efciency of our operations has greatly improved with emissions per
base station now at ten tonnes CO2e, almost 40% lower than in 2007.
Our total carbon emissions in 2014 were 2.55 million tonnes of CO2e,
a slight increase on 2013 due to newly acquired operations.
Want to nd out more?
Read our sustainability report 2013–14, for more information
on Vodafone’s contribution to social and economic development.
vodafone.com/sustainability/report2014
Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2014
Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 201434