Huawei

Huawei partners on a digital literacy programme for women living in rural areas of Bangladesh, using buses with internet access and computers. The company has several products catering to children with disabilities.

Huawei’s TECH4ALL programmes support basic and technical skills development and school connectivity. In Kenya, Huawei works with a non-government organisation to provide classes to students in remote communities. The classes are delivered with the help of a converted shipping container on wheels, equipped with 20 laptops, 20 virtual reality headsets and built-in Wi-Fi. The Huawei ICT Academy is active in more than 70 countries, providing technical training with partner universities.

The company’s cybersecurity practices follow industry norms. It has clear policies on cybersecurity, including defining internal processes for dealing with security issues, having an incident response team and disclosing information on data breaches. It has a noteworthy initiative for child safety that uses a Wi-Fi-equipped vehicle as a digital classroom to deliver courses on cyberbullying and privacy protection to young people in several European countries.

Huawei makes substantial contributions to open standards, with a robust statement supporting open source and standards. It contributes to open source platforms and has a programme dedicated to providing funding opportunities for collaborations with universities.

The company appears to lack initiatives to increase digital accessibility for vulnerable populations. It has an opportunity to enhance disclosure by reporting on the employment of people with disabilities and how the economic value the company creates is distributed among its stakeholders.

Huawei has an opportunity to support intermediate digital skills initiatives to fill the gap between its activities for basic and technical skills development. Additional metrics on its existing programmes, including third-party assessments, would increase understanding of their impacts.

The company demonstrates high-level responsibility and other good practices relating to information security, but should disclose evidence of its information security management certification. It has some initiatives for child online safety but could strengthen practices by demonstrating a high-level commitment to child online protection.

Huawei has an opportunity to strengthen support for the tech start-up ecosystem. The company could also increase transparency regarding the diversity of its R&D activities by reporting on the number of women it employs in R&D roles and the locations of its R&D facilities. While there is evidence of Huawei’s academic collaboration on AI ethics governance, no evidence was found of how the company considers ethics in product development.