Vodafone and the London Business School Bring Mobile For Good Summit to Tanks, Tate Modern

The Mobile for Good Summit will be held in London on 10 December, 2012, hosted by Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone Group, and Sir Andrew Likierman, Dean of London Business School.

The event will focus on the transformational impact mobile technology is having on global health, education, agriculture, financial services and the lives of women. The Summit is being funded by the Vodafone Foundation as part of its Mobile for Good programme.

Speakers will include Justine Greening MP, Secretary of State for International Development; Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University; Cherie Blair, Founder, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women; Dr Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy; Yafang Sun, Chairwoman of the Board, Huawei; Sir Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline; Professor Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics at Yale University; Dame Helen Alexander, Chairman,UBM plc; Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children; Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, formerly Minister of State in the Foreign Office and a former Deputy Secretary-General and Chief of Staff at the UN; Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust; and Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI Alliance. The event will be chaired by Becky Anderson, the anchor of CNN International’s flagship news programme Connect the World.

The Mobile for Good Summit will be a platform for announcing new research and partnerships, showcasing innovative solutions using mobile technology and discussing how businesses, NGOs and governments across the world can work together to implement high impact solutions at scale for public benefit.

Event partners include Editorial Intelligence and CNN International.

Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone Group, said: “Mobiles are radically improving lives in emerging and developed countries. This is one of the most transformative technologies in human history, leading people in emerging markets out of poverty and changing the way businesses operate everywhere.”

Sir Andrew Likierman, Dean, London Business School, said: “Over the last three decades, mobile telephony has emerged from being technologically possible to globally used in countless previously unimagined ways. The impact of mobile telephony has been far reaching. It touches how we communicate, how we work, how we receive information and how we manage our lives.

“At London Business School, our vision is to have a profound impact on the way the world does business and, to that end, we’ve been exploring what it is that inhibits and enables entrepreneurial projects in this field to evolve from pilot to scale. We’re excited to be part of the discussion around this area and very much looking forward to the Summit in December”.

For further information:
www.mobileforgoodsummit.com

Note to Editors

Vodafone Group and the Vodafone Foundation are involved in numerous initiatives aimed at improving lives, including the following:

• In February 2011, the Vodafone Egypt Foundation launched the Illiteracy Eradication Initiative with the aim of helping millions of illiterate adults in Egypt learn to read and write. The aim was to help eradicate adult illiteracy in Egypt within five years and the project was launched in association with UNESCO. The Vodafone Egypt Foundation developed and launched a smartphone application to help users learn how to read and write in Arabic. The application aids learning through a talkback function and picture associated learning. Sixty thousand people have graduated and 100,000 people have enrolled in the programme.
• Every year, an estimated 3,000 women in Tanzania are left without treatment for obstetric fistula. When a frontline health worker in a rural village refers a patient to a specialist hospital, money is sent from the hospital to the local doctor using Vodafone’s M-Pesa mobile text payment system. The doctor books the treatment and arranges travel for the patient.
• The TecSOS handset is an innovative mobile phone designed for use by women at risk of domestic violence. Developed by the Vodafone Spain Foundation in collaboration with the Spanish Red Cross and the TecSOS Foundation, the handset enables a user to push a central button and activate immediate contact with the emergency services, providing instant details of location and enabling an immediate recording of all activity in the immediate vicinity of the handset. The handsets have been used by 20,543 women in 5 European countries.
• In 2009, the Vodafone Foundation announced an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations Foundation to form the Mobile Health Alliance. The mHealth Alliance seeks to encourage the development of healthcare solutions that utilise mobile technology.
• In Kenya, mobile money transfer service M-Pesa is helping farmers access low cost insurance against crop failure. The Kilimo Salama partnership between the Syngenta Sustainable Agriculture Foundation and UAP Insurance provided 22,000 farmers with micro-insurance in 2011, this service helped farmers protect their investment in seeds, fertilisers and chemicals against crop failure due to drought.
• In Turkey, Vodafone Farmers’ Club offers special rates and a range of information services to farmers in Turkey using mobile technology. The service improves farming incomes, as well as increasing efficiency and sustainability. Vodafone launched this initiative with the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

About Vodafone Group

Vodafone is one of the world’s largest mobile communications companies by revenue with approximately 407 million customers in its controlled and jointly controlled markets as of 30 September 2012. Vodafone currently has equity interests in over 30 countries across five continents and more than 50 partner networks worldwide. For more information, please visit www.vodafone.com

About Vodafone Foundation

At the heart of the Foundation is the belief that Vodafone’s mobile communications technologies can address some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges and Vodafone’s responsibility is to utilise mobile technology in mobilising social change and improving people’s lives. The Vodafone Foundation invests in the communities in which Vodafone operates and is at the centre of a network of Vodafone’s global and local social investment programmes. Vodafone Foundation UK registered charity number 1089625.

About London Business School

London Business School’s vision is to have a profound impact on the way the world does business. The School is consistently ranked among the best in the world for its full-time MBA programme. The School holds the highest average research score of any UK academic institution. The School’s faculty, from over 30 countries, is grouped into seven subject areas: Accounting; Economics; Finance; Management Science and Operations; Marketing; Organisational Behaviour; and Strategy and Entrepreneurship. It has four research centres: Aditya Birla India Centre, Centre for Corporate Governance, Coller Institute of Private Equity and Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.