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Driving social progress through
transformational solutions
The most effective way in which we can make a positive societal
contribution is through our business activities – enhancing
connectivity by providing increased access to reliable and
affordable data and voice services. By extending the coverage and
quality of our network, facilitating access to smart devices,
developing and providing segmented customer propositions, and
maintaining a strong focus on pricing transformation, we can
make an enormous contribution to national developmental
objectives and the global UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Through our Vision 2020 strategy we are committed to removing
barriers to accessing digital services, and to harnessing recent
developments in digital technology, to play a transformative role
in financial inclusion, education, agriculture, and healthcare. We
are working in partnership with various stakeholders – including
government, technology providers, civil society organisations and
communities – to identify innovative ways in which mobile and
data technologies can make a significant social contribution in
each of these areas.
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Financial inclusion:
In Tanzania, the DRC, Mozambique and
Lesotho we provide affordable access to mobile banking services
to more than 12.9 million customers, many of them in remote
rural areas, through our ground-breaking M-Pesa product. While
the core benefit of M-Pesa remains the transfer of money
between customers, this has also evolved to enabling people to
save and borrow, and to receive salaries and benefits. In Tanzania,
our M-Pawa savings and loans product, delivered in partnership
with the Commercial Bank of Africa, has gained further traction
with 1.2 million customers now using the service. Our
International Money Transfer services, which enable customers
to send money between Tanzania and Kenya, are also
increasingly being used. We are further expanding M-Pesa
products to merchants across the county to offer ease of
payment at point of sale.
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Education:
Our free learning platform, Vodacom e-school,
provides 220 910 registered learners with content aligned with
their school’s curriculum direct to their mobile phone, tablet or
laptops. The portal is endorsed by the Department of Basic
Education and provides daily lessons, videos and assignments in
the form of quizzes, as well as personalised progress reports. We
are also working in partnership with various publishers to digitise
school and university textbooks and make these available on a
zero-rated portal. In January this year, we launched our Siyakha
platform in South Africa. Focused on the emerging prepaid
segment, the platform offers very low-cost voice and data
bundles, entry-level smartphones, and targeted content
offerings, including free content on specific education, health
and employment websites. In our International operations,
through our Instant Network School initiative we have provided
millions of young people with free access to online learning
material from primary through to advanced high school level.
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Agriculture:
This year, we partnered with the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) to launch
an IoT-based solution to support smallholder farmers in
South Africa to access the commercial agriculture arena. With an
estimated combined investment amount of around R21 million
over three years, the ‘Connected Farmer’ platform, a cloud-based
web and mobile software solution, will link thousands of
smallholder farmers to the agriculture value chain enabling
access to information, services and markets. This initiative
leverages off similar projects that we have been implementing
successfully in Tanzania and Mozambique. By connecting
enterprises, small and commercial agribusinesses, NGOs and
farmer associations, the initiative will contribute to improving
agriculture productivity, addressing food security, creating jobs
and increasing incomes in the agriculture sector.
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Health:
In partnership with Mezzanine we have developed
a mobile platform that allows healthcare professionals in
South Africa to utilise secure mobile devices to send treatment
plans to patients, manage patients’ medical records and monitor
the availability of medicine at the dispensaries, all in real time.
Our mobile application that we launched in partnership with the
Department of Health in 2013, has been rolled out to 3 167
health clinics across eight provinces. We have also continued
with our nationwide awareness campaign using Vodacom
technology in the ‘text-to-treatment’ approach to get the
message on HIV/Aids treatment to as many affected people as
possible. In Tanzania, we provide free text messages with
maternal health advice for pregnant women and mothers with
newborns. In partnership with USAID, we have launched a
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