Vodafone’s 5-point plan to help counter impacts of COVID-19 outbreak

March 2020

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we put in place a number of measures to mitigate the spread of the virus while ensuring business continuity and connectivity for the digital society.

Since COVID-19 is a rapidly evolving situation, the circumstances on the ground in our different markets may vary. Given our ability to fully operate remotely, we have closed our Vodafone Luxembourg office tentatively until August which is to be reviewed closely following the local guidance from the Luxembourg government. Vodafone has also suspended all business travel globally to reduce the risk of unintentionally spreading the virus. We are leveraging virtual meetings and digital ways of working to ensure no impact on our business.
 
In VRS, our first and second line teams have taken several precautionary measures to ensure the wellbeing of the team as well as service continuation for our roaming partners. All planned works are carefully reviewed and prioritised to neutralize any impact to the service and network
 
Vodafone also announced a five point plan to support the communities in which we operate in Europe, to ensure people stay connected to family and friends, businesses can more easily work remotely, health services can access additional support and students are able to continue their education virtually.
 
We are committing to:

  1. Maintaining quality of service of networks during exceptional usage periods As a provider of critical connectivity and communications services, our first priority is to focus on capacity across our networks to make sure they are resilient and can absorb any new usage patterns arising as more people start working from home.
  2. Providing capacity and services for critical government functions We have launched several initiatives that will help support healthcare services in all of Vodafone markets, such as offering hospitals additional network capacity and services, prioritising emergency calls, and free access to Government-supported healthcare sites. As schools in many countries are being closed, we will also offer free access to governments’ educational resources, and any other educational resources recommended by national educational authorities and academic institutions.
  3. Improving dissemination of information to the public We are offering all governments the dissemination of critical information via text alerts and capability of targeted text messaging due to the importance of timely and accurate information to the public.
  4. Facilitating work from home and helping the small and micro businesses within our supply chain In order to mitigate the economic repercussions of the health crisis, we are already supporting our multinational customers to enable more than 2.5 million employees across the world to work from home for the first time.  Additionally, foreseeing any liquidity problems that may arise, we will ensure that all new orders issued to our micro and small suppliers providing goods and services to Vodafone’s European operations will be paid in 15 days, instead of the customary 30 to 60 days.
  5. Improving governments’ insights of people’s movements in affected areas wherever technically possible, and legally permissible, we will be willing to assist governments and work with all partners in developing insights based on large anonymized data sets.

These measures will be kept in place until at least September, in addition to financial support and digital initiatives already being undertaken by the Vodafone Foundation including re-purposing DreamLab to support research for a vaccine and working with UNICEF to use machine learning and data science to protect the most vulnerable members of society.

Please stay safe and don’t hesitate to contact us for any support we can provide.

Find out more about Vodafone's COVID-19 activities.