By Marco Malfavon, Americas Communications, Alcatel-Lucent.

Being uprooted from their countries and having to deal with a unknown and a lot of times hostile environment is just the beginning of the struggle that many kids and young adults face as they become part of the ever growing flow of migrants looking for new life opportunities. In Barcelona, Spain, hundreds if not thousands of disadvantaged youngsters who should be attending school or working in stable jobs, are left with minimal opportunities due to their difficult socioeconomic conditions.

The Fundacion Adsis, with the support of Alcatel-Lucent, is working to help these disadvantaged youngsters go back to and stay in school, or acquire the basic skills to look for a viable job.  Since the launch of the “Youth with Future” program, close to 150 boys and girls have participated in group workshops and individual or tutoring sessions. For those participants who have not completed secondary studies, the focus is ensuring that they reinsert themselves in the educational system. Those searching for a job start with an individual assessment to determine their interests, motivation, and skills. The program includes computer training, skills development, job search techniques, interview workshops and others. The training is complemented by a series of group activities to foster self-esteem and social interactions.

Read More…

By Bishalakhi Ghosh, Director, Alcatel-Lucent Foundation.

In 2011, the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation partnered with World Education to start our Global Signature Program – ConnectEd. The idea behind this program was to be able to provide help to participants who are mainly young adults and are striving to enter the “world of work”. Also given our technology leadership and expertise, it was decided that digitization of education and tools will be a focal point in this program. Today we have completed 2 successful years in this program, have provided digital training to 12,513 youth, 60% of them girls!

As we start working on our 3^rd year, I took sometime to talk to World Education Program Director for ConnectEd, Estelle Day, to understand how this program is helping the participants, what has been challenging and what has been successful.

What were the influencing factors in determining the form and structure of ConnectEd?

World Education has been working for 60 years in over 40 countries. Over those many years we have learnt what types of education interventions are most effective in helping vulnerable youth get ahead and break down the cycles of disadvantage surrounding them.

Read More…

By Susan Morgan, Executive Director, Global Network Initiative.

Information and communications technology (ICT) companies—from search engines and software providers to network operators and equipment vendors—enable access to information and the exchange of ideas around the world. But the more we depend on technology in every part of our lives, the more that company business decisions can impact human rights, particularly free expression and privacy.

Governments have legitimate national security and law enforcement responsibilities that require assistance from technology companies, from fighting terrorism to protecting children online. But when governments, whether in pursuit of legitimate objectives or not, seek to remove content, restrict network access, or request users’ personal information, it puts companies in a difficult situation. Dramatic Internet shutdowns have captured worldwide public attention, but are just one part of a complex challenge.

Read More…

By Edoardo Gai, Head of Sustainability Services, RobecoSAM

We are excited about the publication of the 10^th year anniversary edition of the Sustainability Yearbook. Each year, we highlight the results of our in-depth analysis of the sustainability performance over 2,000 companies worldwide. The analysis focuses on industry-specific factors that we believe are important to long-term value creation and is based on up to 120 financially material economic, environmental, social and governance criteria.

In addition, our analysis frequently incorporates newly arising sustainability factors that are likely to gain importance and have an impact on companies’ ability to generate value. For instance, this year we focused our attention on the sustainable management of supply chains and integrated reporting.

As part of our commitment to continuously enhancing our methodology, over the last two years we have devoted considerable effort towards understanding and defining the most important issues that companies must consider if they wish to mitigate the risks in their supply chain. Equally important, is the companies’ ability to capture opportunities linked to closer cooperation with their suppliers. In order to provide transparency on our methodology, and in the hopes of initiating a dialogue among our stakeholders, we have shared some of our insights from our evaluation of companies’ supply chain management in this year’s Sustainability Yearbook. Read More…

By Lin Guiyang, Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell

For us at Alcatel-Lucent, Corporate Responsibility is a fundamental part of everything we do – a true business imperative.  With the theme “technological innovation benefiting the whole society”, Alcatel-Lucent and its Chinese flagship company – Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, have made active efforts in fulfilling their corporate responsibilities, and have achieved outstanding results in enhancing business values, building a green enterprise, employee care, supplier chain management and contributing to building a harmonious society in China over the years.

For instance, let me share with you couple of examples how we are putting our core values at the heart of our day-to-day business.  Shanghai Shenyan Communications, a local Shanghai supplier, was initially surprised by the outcome of Alcatel-Lucent’s corporate responsibility assessment, but quickly engaged with Alcatel-Lucent to understand the gap between their current management system and ICT industry expectations.  The supplier organized a team, developed an improvement plan and implemented changes which netted an energy consumption cost decrease of 16%!

Read More…