Contribution to society

We contribute to the development of society through environmental protection, digital inclusion, privacy, and cyber security.

Telia Social Impact Report

read the reports

Contribution to society

We contribute to the development of society through environmental protection, digital inclusion, privacy, and cyber security.

Telia Social Impact Report

read the reports

Mission at Telia

Our mission at Telia is to contribute to the development of society, making Estonia a better place to live and work.

When initiating new projects or advancing ongoing ones, we always think about the environmental footprint or handprint of related activities. We take into account the danger of the digital divide and try to act so that no one is left behind.

We consider it important that all privacy and security requirements are met in the best possible way.

Contributing to important areas of impact, such as environmental protection, digital inclusion, privacy, and cybersecurity, are part of Telia’s values and business strategy.

The environment and circular economy

Digital inclusion

Privacy and security

Sustainability

We are also incorporating the UN Sustainable Development Goals into our strategies and innovative work, focusing the most on industry, infrastructure, more sustainable cities, and measures to combat climate change.

We also share the principles of peaceful and inclusive institutions. For us, gender equality, oceans and marine resources, employment, economic growth, global cooperation, and sustainable energy are all very important.

Our employees, clients, and partners make it possible to fulfil all of the set goals. In addition, we have joined several organisations and agreements to contribute to the development of society in general:

Telia is a member of the Green Tiger representative organisation – our goal is to create the basis for a development-oriented economy that is in balance with nature.
In 2018, Telia joined the Diversity Charter, where we affirmed that we respect the diversity of people and value the principles of equal treatment.
As a member of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications, we help to popularise the ICT sector, promote professional education, and improve legislation.
We are a member of the Innovative Companies Club of the Estonian Employers’ Confederation, which includes companies that invest at least 2% of their turnover in research and development activities.
Since 2021, we have been an investor member of the Responsible Business Forum, and a long-term regular member before that.

The Responsible Business Forum in Estonia

The Responsible Business Forum in Estonia (RBF) has awarded Telia Eesti with its highest or gold-level quality label, recognising the company’s fair, informed and environmentally friendly activity.

The quality label is awarded to companies who participated in the Estonian CSR Index, who value sustainable development and make strategic contributions to society and to preserving the natural environment.

Telia’s support activities

Telia’s support activities focus on initiatives related to the environment, digitalisation, and the security and privacy of cyberspace.

If the project you initiated fits our focuses or complements one of our existing support projects, please fill in the form below and send it our way.

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Reports archive

Telia's Social Impact Report 2022 Telia's Social Impact Report 2021

Digitalisation

Digitalisation has great potential from an environmental perspective – by offering our clients environmentally friendly solutions, we can reduce both direct costs and carbon emissions.

As part of this, we have set science-based goals as the next milestone in our environmental journey, endorsed by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBT).

Goals

From the environmental protection point of view, we plan to make all our activities emission-free and waste-free by 2030. In order to achieve our ambitious goals, we have set interim targets for 2025:

We will reduce the carbon emissions associated with Telia’s activities by a factor of two
We will reduce carbon emissions from equipment sold by Telia by 29%
We will bring the share of suppliers who meet science-based climate targets to 72%
By 2030, Telia’s operations will be both CO2 emission and waste-free throughout its value chain.

To calculate its footprint, Telia has chosen the Scope3 scale, which functions on the basis of the company’s value chain, allowing the company to assess the impact of emissions throughout its value chain and determine how to achieve carbon neutrality most effectively.

The largest share of Telia’s emissions consist of purchased services, products, and Telia equipment that consumes energy at its clients’ location.

0 CO2 – Green energy

Since 2016, Telia has been using only green electricity produced in a sustainable and responsible way. For years, Telia has also been reusing the thermal energy generated in its server parks.
A solar farm that provides energy to Telia’s largest data centre in Estonia started operating at the end of 2020. In 2021, approximately 160 tonnes of carbon dioxide was not emitted into the air thanks to the solar farm. The same amount is generated for one average gasoline-powered car by traveling 1.2 million kilometres.
In March 2021, Telia Eesti and Eesti Energia signed an extensive renewable energy contract for the supply of 156 GWh of renewable energy. The energy will be produced at the Telšiai wind farm, which is being built in Lithuania.
When developing the network, Telia makes sure that the amount of energy needed to transmit a single unit of data is less and less from year to year.
In 2020, we started replacing our vehicle fleet with electric cars, which supports our goal of reducing CO2 emissions from our operations to zero by 2030.
Telia’s Internet of Things or IoT technologies can be successfully used to digitise business or organisational processes, thereby saving on costs, ensuring better production quality, and increasing management transparency and speed.
One of our strategic focuses in recent years has also been the concept of a smart city. The University of Tartu, the City of Tartu and Telia Eesti have signed a memorandum of cooperation, the essence of which is to continue cooperation in order to create a better and more innovative living environment in Tartu. The development of a smart city is primarily related to the SmartEnCity project, the aim of which is to renovate the outdated households located in the centre of Tartu into energy-efficient, smart, and attractive households. Smart city solutions are supported by the development of 5G.

0 Waste - Telia aims to make its operations completely waste-free

We reduce the amount of electronic waste by offering refurbished smartphones, routers and set-top boxes to our clients. We accept all old electronic devices at our shops, to which we give a new life, if possible, or which we dispose of responsibly.
We are actively looking for ways to reduce the share of packaging through reuse.
We are actively replacing old copper cables with fibre-optic cables. Old cables are recycled and metals are reused in production.
In addition, we are committed to reducing our digital footprint and that of our clients, including digital waste. We organise Estonia-wide digital clean-up days, participation in which has increased exponentially over the years.

100% Action

Telia is a member of the Green Tiger representative organisation – our goal is to create the basis for a development-oriented economy that is in balance with nature.
For years, Telia has been advising clients to abandon paper invoices and replace them with e-invoices. For all clients who opted out of paper invoices, we planted a total of 7,000 new trees in the Järvselja study forest that has a 90-year history.
Most of Telia’s employees have undergone environmental training and the company has own-initiative groups aimed at promoting the topics of diversity, inclusion, and the environment in Telia.

Green offers

At Telia, we have made it one of our goals to contribute to the circulation of equipment, which supports the fulfilment of the company’s environmental goals.

Telia offers its clients devices that have been used by clients but are in good working order: routers, set-top boxes and remote controls.
Green IT, a subsidiary of Telia, offers the possibility of renting equipment, which is a significantly more environmentally friendly alternative to purchasing. At the end of the rental period, 99% of the equipment will find a new owner, and outdated equipment will be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.
The Trade-in program allows clients to return their old device and get a new one at a better price. Telia refers the old device into responsible treatment.
In 2020, Telia also started selling refurbished smartphones, the purchase of which avoids the energy and material consumption that would occur in the production and transport of a new phone.

View products

Digital inclusion

For us, one of the most important societal and social goals is to make living and working in Estonia better through smart and inclusive digitalisation.

An important topic in the case of digital inclusion is accessibility to Telia’s services and equipment, ensuring which to all residents of Estonia is our continuous and daily work. Telia Company has set itself the goal of reaching one million people by 2025 regarding digital inclusion.

We want all people to be more involved in a society that is becoming increasingly digitalised, and for people to keep up with the development of technology In this task, we place a particular focus on children and the elderly.

Telia Estonia has joined the Diversity Charter and has been the holder of the diversity label ‘We Respect Differences’ since 2020.

Telia's diversity and inclusion goals support equal opportunities and gender balance.

Telia Children's Advisory Panel Surveys

Report on the 2021 study: Children’s experiences with online disinformation (EST)
Report on the 2020 study: e-learning during distance learning (EST)
Report on the 2019 study: Children’s Advisory Panel, online games and e-sports (EST)
Tips for parents about online games (EST)
Principles of Telia: responsible online gaming (EST)
Report on the 2018 study (EST)

Telia Company’s website on children’s rights

Children and young people

We work with other companies and organisations to make children’s Internet use as safe as possible. Since 2016, we have been conducting the Greatest Courage initiative to combat cyberbullying.
Telia supported the creation of the cybersecurity game Spoofy, intended for primary school students, by organising its communication activities, recording characters’ voices, and providing a platform for an online version of the game that has been enjoyed by more than 26,000 unique users.
At the beginning of 2021, Telia and the Estonian educational technology start-up Clanbeat developed an application that helps teachers to more consciously support the well-being of their students and their own development. The game has reached 40% of Estonian schools in 2021.
Telia supports the Codesters.Club technology studies programme, the content of which is the promotion of technology studies at the upper secondary school level in several regions across Estonia.
Telia supports the IT laboratory project of the University of Tartu School of Science, the aim of which is to promote technology knowledge at the basic school level also in smaller regions of Estonia – so that talents do not go undetected and undeveloped.
Telia supports the Solaride Academy educational project which aims to contribute to the popularisation of technology education. Participants in the programme will also receive development training on teamwork, management and sustainability.
The safety, well-being, and rights of children on the Internet are issues that we address in all countries where Telia is represented. Every year, we carry out the Children’s Advisory Panel study in cooperation with the Estonian Union for Child Welfare and the schools of Estonia in order to understand how children see the digital world. We ask children about their concerns and joys of an online world and what advice they would give other children to use the Internet safely.
Together with F-Secure, Telia launched the new security solution Telia SAFE, which can be used on a computer, tablet or smartphone, and which helps children to have safe adventures in the digital world.

The elderly

For years already, Telia has been distinguished for developing digital competences for older people – almost half of the participants in the Telia image survey in 2021 called it one of the important topics that Telia deals with in society.

In 2021, Telia and the University of Tartu started the Young Digital Mentors programme, which aims to develop the digital competence of older people under the guidance of young people and create lasting relationships between generations. The new knowledge will also protect against falling victim to disinformation and fraud, and will help Telia design products and services to better suit the elderly.

In cooperation with Telia and the ETV TV show „Prillitoos“ a ten-part smart assistance section was created so that older people could learn the important rules of using a computer and be able to perform specific operations, from searching for information to making bank payments.

Accessibility

We have created a working group to adapt Telia’s services to people with special needs: from developing the accessibility of TV content and web environments to improving the entire customer experience chain.

We have participated in developing a draft to the Accessibility to Products and Services Act
OWe have involved a group of experts to ensure the accessibility of Telia’s services and products in accordance with WCAG standard
The 50 most visited pages of Telia.ee and Diil.ee have been developed to meet the requirements of the WCAG standard
More and more content arrives on Telia TV with closed captions
Our frontline staff have undergone training on how to better serve clients with special needs
We have analysed the accessibility of our shops. We actively involve people with special needs in our activities so that everyone could visit our shops

Women into technology

In the field of digital inclusion, there are still several challenges in Estonian society: for example, the share of women in Estonian IT companies reaches only 20%.

That is why we are encouraging new generations and facilitating women currently looking for their next challenges in the labour market to find them in the IT field, specifically.

Our goal is to maintain gender balance in Telia at all levels, from management and middle management to compositions of teams. In addition, we are actively dealing with issues related to the pay gap. Telia does not tolerate gender discrimination.
We offer internships in the retraining programme ‘Work in TECH’, during which Estonian women can start working in positions requiring IT skills.
We support the girls’ technology group HK Unicorn Squad with iPads.
We offer opportunities for young people for internships in Telia’s technology unit and, if possible, make a job offer to the best interns.
One of the prerequisites for cooperation projects aimed at young people is to encourage the next generation to distinguish themselves in the field of technology.

Data protection

We have asked people what are the most important topics for them regarding Internet security. A total of 47% of respondents highlighted data protection and privacy issues, and 33% highlighted cyberbullying issues.

In the field of privacy and security, 75% of respondents considered the protection of personal data and secure Internet use to be the most important.

In order to maintain the trust of our clients, we must ensure the security of personal data and make sure that the data is processed lawfully.
In addition, we have a duty to comply with legal requirements regarding the protection of personal data. We protect the data of Telia’s clients in very different ways: we assess data protection risks in the development of our services and products, rely on the basic principles of data protection in each activity, and monitor whether the necessary measures have been taken to mitigate the risks of misuse of personal data. We also manage data protection risks with regular training of employees.

Services for private and business clients

We have created services for our private and business clients which provide protection against the most common cyber threats:

Telia SAFE offers the highest level of cybersecurity to all devices in your family in cooperation with F-Secure, protecting all mobile smart devices in addition to your computer. The data in the smartphone is also protected in the event of theft or loss of the device.

Turvanet is a next generation Internet service for business clients that offers your business fast connectivity and protection against the most common cyber threats.

Children

Telia’s goal is to ensure safe Internet use for children and young people, as children are particularly vulnerable to online threats such as cyberbullying and age-inappropriate content.

In November 2021, the ‘Greatest Courage’ campaign aimed at raising awareness and prevention of cyberbullying, in which teachers, parents and Telia employees participate as volunteers, took place for the fifth time.
In 2021, to create e-learning materials, Telia supported the Bullying-Free School that is engaged in bullying prevention through a science-based approach.
Telia supported the creation of the cybersecurity game Spoofy, intended for primary school students, by organising its communication activities, recording characters’ voices, and providing a platform for an online version of the game that has been enjoyed by more than 26,000 unique users.
In the autumn of 2021, Telia conducted an advisory panel study on the reliability of information in Estonia in cooperation with the Union for Child Welfare. The workshops of the study took place with the participation of 100 children at Kostivere School, Tallinn Joint Upper Secondary School, and Laagna Upper Secondary School. According to the survey, 68% of Estonian children who participated in the study have been exposed to disinformation.

The elderly

In 2021, Telia and the University of Tartu started the Young Digital Mentors programme, which aims to develop the digital competence of older people under the guidance of young people and create lasting relationships between generations. New knowledge also protects against falling victim to disinformation and fraud.

Telia’s IT services have the ISO 27001 (Information security management) certification, which confirms that Telia regularly identifies, assesses, and manages security risks.