In 2019, we are participating in the Voka Sustainable Business Charter for the third time. This year we’ve submitted 17 actions, with “Cyber security” as our main focus.
Every participant in the Voka Sustainable Business Charter undertakes to launch at least 10 successful actions that contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
In 2017, we participated for the first time. This year we would like to achieve 17 goals. We will also continue a number of last year's actions. We will continue to house the CoderDojo in Leuven, where we will teach about 30 children per session how to program with Scratch. Via our cafeteria scheme we also continue to encourage sustainable commutes by lease bike.
Cyber security
Cyber Security is an important theme this year. We are installing anycast nodes in the networks of our major telecom providers. This will ensure a more robust internet in Belgium that is better protected against cyberattacks, among other things. At the start of this year we joined The Cyber Security Coalition, where we want to assume a more active role in various working groups.
We are also launching our own R&D project to get fake webshops offline more quickly and we are working together internationally to share our knowledge in the field of risk management and business continuity with other registries.
Climate
A second important theme is the climate. At the start of this year we were elected climate ambassador for the Province of Flemish Brabant. This is a great honour for which we are happy to take responsibility. It resulted in 4 climate-related actions:
- a CO2-neutral business management
- stimulating the use of tap water as drinking water
- different talks to explain our climate policy
- biological seed bombs by way of sustainable promotional gift
Education and transfer of knowledge
A third important component is education and transfer of knowledge. We already launched “De Codekrakers”, an educational game that explains how the internet works to children aged 10 to 12. We are working with a number of knowledge institutes in Belgium and are sharing our expertise with them. We are also establishing a new non-profit organisation that will make hardware available to social organisations that teach youngsters digital skills.
And finally, there are a number of smaller actions on stress prevention, healthy food and fitness at work, the switch to a sustainable home banker and the accessibility of the internet via the Anysurfer label.
All the actions we launched over the past years are linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Over the past years we launched at least 1 action that contributes to each of these 17 goals. As from this year we also consistently include these SDGs in our communication via our corporate website, Twitter and Facebook. We do this to raise awareness of these goals for a better world by 2030.
With this article, we support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.