Refugee aid: Commitment honored

Dec 18, 2015

• Support in six action areas
• Aid measures will continue in 2016

At the end of the year, Deutsche Telekom views the outcome of the aid measures aimed at helping tackle the refugee issue in Germany as positive. "We have achieved the targets that the refugee support task force set for itself in September," says Christian P. Illek, Deutsche Telekom's Chief Human Resources Officer, who is responsible for the Group's aid efforts, adding, "There is no question that we will continue to shoulder our social responsibilities in the coming year and provide help where we can."

An overview of Deutsche Telekom's efforts:

Wi-Fi for refugees: At the end of the year, more than 70,000 refugees in Germany will have Internet access via Deutsche Telekom HotSpots. To achieve this, the company equipped 60 refugee reception centers (which means almost 100 percent) with Wi-Fi Internet access.

Deutsche Telekom identified 100 buildings with a total floor area of 28,000 square meters in its real estate portfolio that are suitable for rental or sale, and offered them to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and the regional authorities. More than 50 percent of the space is already being used for refugee aid purposes, and demand remains high.

Some 550 Deutsche Telekom employees have applied to work at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees ( BAMF ) to help process requests for asylum. 175 have already started work at the BAMF.

To make it easier for refugees to access the German labor market, Deutsche Telekom is currently offering more than 100 internships , which are advertised on the everjobs and workeer websites. We have received more than 250 applications for these positions and have already been able to offer 25 internships to applicants. The first refugees have already begun their internships.

Deutsche Telekom supports its employees to get involved in aid activities on a voluntary basis. In the last quarter of the year, employees in Germany launched 40 projects aimed at contributing to refugee aid efforts and carried these out as social days. Employees are also active as volunteers in Austria and in other subsidiaries in countries along the refugee route.

The Deutsche Telekom portal www.refugees.telekom.de went live at the start of October. On the portal, refugees can find a wide variety of information about living in Germany, legal matters and local offers of aid, all in eight different languages. News in Arabic and English is now also included on the website, in cooperation with the ZDF television channel. Initial evaluations of use of the portal show that 75 percent of hits come from smartphones, while the other 25 percent come from desktop computers. The most-viewed sites are the local sites for the cities/communities in which Deutsche Telekom has equipped refugee reception centers with Wi-Fi. 90 percent of hits to the refugee portal come from Germany and 10 percent from other countries. Information is viewed most often in Arabic, followed by English.

"We have garnered a lot of valuable experience in the last 12 weeks," summarizes Christian Illek. "We have taken steps aimed at helping resolve this challenge, one that faces society as a whole, and have focused on areas in which Deutsche Telekom has particular expertise. We have been able to begin providing our help quickly and pragmatically." The aid measures will continue in the coming year. "Our work on the refugee portal has shown us that we can improve our support for refugees by collaborating with other companies," says Illek. "We will keep working on this."