2016 HAS BEEN A TRANSFORMATIONAL YEAR FOR VEON AND WE CONTINUE TO BUILD ON OUR CR STRATEGY OF RECENT YEARS.
All of our OpCo’s participated in our flagship Make Your Mark (MYM) program resulting in:
- 9,397 people attending entrepreneurship educational events (classes, conferences)
- The launch of ICT incubators in Bangladesh and Pakistan under public private partnerships
- Kyivstar’s (Ukraine) launch of a big data school in 2016 to train young ICT specialists and engineers, implemented in partnership with a renowned business school in Madrid and Microsoft, Ukraine
- Expansion of our tech-hub in Rome, making it one of the largest business accelerators in Europe
- 1000 teams registering to participate in Eurasia Mobile Challenge 2016
Our focus is on “societal” services and scalable solutions in areas such as financial services, health, education and agriculture. This has allowed us to provide “mobile literacy” to 10,000 adult female learners in Pakistan, teaching them to read newspapers, write in Urdu, perform everyday calculations and gain life skills with the help of four specifically designed textbooks.
In mobile financial services, we continue to address financial inclusion. Banglalink started as a pioneer of new and innovative digital financial services and now has a total of 10.2 million customers who have a wallet with Banglalink. In 2016, it had some 88 million MFS transactions and Banglalink is growing a retail base actively participating in MFS.
Last year, Jazz Cash in Pakistan conducted over 100 million transactions amounting to almost PKR 2.9 billion (USD 276 million) in value and now has the largest distribution network in the country. Jazz Cash is helping the local government with educational grants and has disbursed PKR 570 million (USD 5.4 million) amongst deserving students through digital wallets.
Our commitment to community engagement has resulted in over USD 2.6 million in social investments, 10,293 employee volunteering hours and USD 191,995 in in-kind donations.