Archives: Sub Pillars

Digital Services

Fostering digital inclusion supports future economic growth and empowers people, including vulnerable groups such as women and youth. We are building a digital ecosystem centred around advanced messaging, local language content, expanding communities and unlocking opportunities for greater financial inclusion

Accelerating financial inclusion

Increasing financial inclusion through the use of digital technology is an essential element in furthering the economic development of Africa.

We believe that MTN has the potential to be a transformational force in the mobile financial services industry. We are playing a critical role in the evolution of mobile financial services by offering solutions such as in-store payments, remittances, prepaid services, mobile wallets, micro-loans, and micro-insurance. These services are easily available to individuals and several other services are accessible to small and medium enterprises through MoMoBusiness.

MTN’s digitally inclusive environment supports SME’s by offering them a secure, convenient and efficient payment method that can be tailored to meet their unique needs

Providing inclusive connectivity

People and communities that are connected are ultimately empowered. Access to affordable means of communication has the power to change lives and bridge inequalities. To this end, MTN focuses on providing increased access and reducing the cost of communication of voice and data services and in doing so, advancing digital inclusion. The digital inclusion of marginalised groups such as women and youth are essential in the development of an inclusive society.

Africa’s connectivity relies on building the infrastructure that connects people and countries. We therefore invest in pan-African infrastructure on a national and regional level to enhance inclusive connectivity. Our end-to-end fixed connectivity services range from subsea cables, cable-landing stations and data centres to inter-country and cross-country fibre networks. This infrastructure is ke

Extensive infrastructure is required across the globe to meet ever-increasing connectivity demands, but physical infrastructure in the telecommunication industry is costly and resource-intensive to develop. We have therefore shifted towards infrastructure sharing to reduce costs, optimize connectivity and creating shared value. While mobile has been driving digital inclusion, there remain significant connectivity gaps in areas that are not yet covered by a mobile broadband network. These uncovered communities – predominantly rural, poor and sparsely populated – are the most challenging to reach in a financially sustainable manner.

Contributing through tax

We are committed to boosting inclusive economic growth on the continent. MTN considers tax as an instrument to create socioeconomic cohesion, environmental value creation and long-term prosperity. As one of the biggest taxpayers in many of our markets, MTN makes a significant contribution to the local economies. Our contribution from tax revenues includes corporate taxes, indirect taxes, withholding taxes, payroll taxes, operating licence fees and other payments to government authorities. 

MTN has a robust, transparent, and effectively communicated tax strategy in place. Disclosures in our tax report demonstrate the Group’s contribution to the societies to which we are accountable. 

Treating Customers fairly

We embrace our ethical responsibilities towards our customers and are committed to treating our customers fairly – Customer centricity is at the core of our human rights approach, we embrace ethical conduct in dealing with our customers and ensure that their rights are respected

We embrace our ethical responsibilities towards our customers and are committed to ensuring the best customer experience. Our Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) policy entrenches our efforts to protect customers and ensure fairness for those interacting with our services across the Group. To facilitate transparency and customer control, we have developed a framework ensuring that our customers are treated fairly. The framework sets the mandatory requirements for implementation in key customer service processes in all MTN operations.

Diversity and inclusion

We recognise the value of diverse and inclusive teams. Diversity of thought, skills and experience drives innovation, which is essential to achieving our strategy and supports our purpose. We are passionate about creating an inclusive, accessible and supportive environment, a place where everyone can be themselves and feel a sense of belonging. We are deliberate in our hiring of people with disabilities. 

Our journey towards our deliberate diversity and inclusion vision has been core to MTN’s people plans.

• We committed to achieving workforce gender equality by 2030.
• We committed to gender pay parity.
• We committed to attaining deliberate gender representation in our strategic programmes. We aim to achieve a minimum of 30% women representation in business transformations, upskilling programmes and specialised initiatives that form part of Ambition 2025.

Accelerating rural connectivity

With a significant portion of Africa’s population living in rural areas, we are committed to expanding our network to underserved communities and are targeting 95% broadband coverage by 2025. By end-2022, our broadband coverage (including rural areas) was 87.8% as we rolled out an additional 1 669 rural sites, expanding rural coverage to 30.8 million people. We are closing coverage gaps through collaboration with several partners and OpenRAN technology. To complement our terrestrial network connectivity, we plan to conduct pilot projects for low earth orbit satellite connectivity.