Proximus

Proximus provides discounted services to people with low incomes, the elderly and people with disabilities. The company also provides adaptations to its products for people with disabilities. Furthermore, it partners with Passe Muraille, a Belgian organisation working to foster inclusion for people with disabilities, to solicit feedback on accessibility.

The company’s Technobel programme provides jobseekers with digital skills training. The company is also one of the founders of Campus 19, a free Belgian coding school.

Proximus meets industry norms by having a cybersecurity incident response team, which collaborates with a range of organisations such as the Belgian Cyber Security Coalition co-founded by Proximus. It also offers parental controls for its services and has a partnership with the Belgian foundation Child Focus for promoting child online safety.

Proximus has a range of open source projects and collaborates with four Belgian universities on topics such as artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT). The company also provides support for start-ups through collaboration and has provided big data to cities and governments for crowd management.

Proximus can provide participation metrics as well as its financial and in-kind contributions to its programme for reduced tariffs. It also has the opportunity to carry out a third-party impact assessment of the programme. Proximus can also consider introducing its own programme for promoting digital opportunities for women and girls. Additionally, the company could disclose how the economic value it generates is distributed among its stakeholders as well as the income taxes it pays and its employment in its main markets.

The company has the opportunity to disclose participation numbers as well as its financial and in-kind contributions to its programmes for skills development. Additionally, it can carry out a third-party assessment for the programmes to better understand the impact on beneficiaries.

Proximus could make a high-level commitment to cybersecurity and disclose more information on senior-level oversight of cybersecurity. The company could also make its information security management certificate publicly available. Further, Proximus could resume disclosing the number of data breaches as it did in the past. As a digital company, Proximus could also make a high-level policy commitment to child online safety.

While the company has a range of open source projects, it could consider making a high-level commitment to open source initiatives more broadly. Proximus can also expand its support for social or non-profit start-ups and entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups. In addition, Proximus can enhance transparency on how it supports inclusive and ethical innovation by reporting the number of women it employs in tech roles, establishing an ethics committee specifically for its innovation activities, and developing a publicly available ethical artificial intelligence (AI) framework. 

Proximus commits to respecting human rights and the ILO core labour rights, and it has a publicly available policy statement that expects its business relationships to commit to respecting the ILO core labour rights. The company has included human rights issues in its materiality assessment. However, it does not disclose a process to identify, assess and act on salient human rights risks in its own operations and in its business relationships. Moreover, Proximus describes the various stakeholders it engages with in general, but it does not specify whether it engages with stakeholders whose human rights could be affected by its activities. The company has a grievance mechanism accessible to both workers and external stakeholders to raise human rights concerns and complaints. However, it is unclear if complainants can choose to remain anonymous.

Proximus publicly commits to respecting worker health and safety, and it places health and safety expectations on its business relationships and monitors their performance. Furthermore, the company has a policy commitment stating that it does not require workers to work more than the regular and overtime hours. It also expects its business relationships to do the same. Proximus discloses the proportion of its workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements, but it does not provide information on its commitment to paying its workers a living wage. The company is committed to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment and has a time-bound target on the subject. It also discloses a breakdown of employees in different employee categories by age and gender.

Proximus has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption, and it includes anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in its business relationship contracts. However, the company does not disclose any relevant information in relation to tax, such as a global tax strategy or its income tax payments in individual tax jurisdictions. Proximus states that it does not make political contributions, but it does not disclose its overarching approach to lobbying and political engagement in a publicly available policy document. It also does not disclose its lobbying expenditures.