Softphone's catchline, "Empower Every Customer Dialog", emphasizes the relevance and centrality we attribute to every single client and interaction. However, we have decided not to limit this focus to our business and fulfill our corporate citizen's responsibility.
Softphone's CSR activity represents the meeting point between our business strategy and our desire to contribute to the solution of global challenges the world needs to face. To be specific, we decided to concentrate our efforts on defending the poorest and most vulnerable populations and aim to guarantee everyone food security, education, work, and sustainable development.
An exponentially growing help
In 2018, to attain our ambitious objective, we established a partnership with Interlife, an NGO actively cooperating in India and Ivory Coast with two leading drivers: sustainable development and environmental protection.
Interlife has devised a new development model blending microcredit and social enterprise's features. Through a simple, concrete and innovative instrument, the Interlife Toolkits, beneficiaries become donors and promoters of the entire community's growth.
These Toolkits contain professional training, equipment, raw materials, and all necessary to start a farming or breeding activity generating income and wellbeing for an entire familiar group. Once the beneficiary family has become independent, they create a new Toolkit with their own material and donate it to someone else in turn.
We have decided to support Interlife precisely because of this participatory and sustainable model, enabling vulnerable populations to build a lifetime project and establish a virtuous and replicable circle across their community.
Over here are a few figures to summarize our partnership with Interlife:
• We donated 170 Toolkits, corresponding to 8% of our 2018 corporate profit.
• Every €1,000 invoiced by Softphone in 2018 helped 56.5 persons.
• Every license sold by Softphone in 2018 supported 17 beneficiaries.
A significant impact on people
When approaching a complex and many-sided issue like migration, it is fundamental to understand its motivations. Africans are generally prompted to migrate because of either conflicts or poverty. Our project with Interlife operates in this latter case and takes place in Ivory Coast.
Data about African migration across the Mediterranean Sea are fragmented and probably underrated. According to IOM's Missing Migrants Project, 8% of those trying to reach European coasts in 2019 never made it (5.3% in 2018).
Our ambition is to prevent vulnerable people from risking their lives during these journeys of hope. The best way to help is by granting them food security and income-generating activities, which will cause economic and social value in their community and lead to a growing and lasting effect beyond the project's end.
Interlife has roughly calculated this project is improving the conditions of 28.6% of those who would leave the Ivory Coast for Europe, therefore offering them and their families an alternative to desperate migration: a future in their home country.
