June 27, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Hewlett-Packard Company, in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Microsoft Corporation, in Redmond, Wash., have announced that they will earmark at least 20 percent of their philanthropy budgets for technology projects in developing countries.
The companies made their pledges as they signed on to the CEO Charter for Digital Development, a project started by the World Economic Forum to encourage corporations to support efforts to bring the benefits of information technology to developing countries. The World Economic Forum is a nonprofit organization in Geneva that is financed by 1,000 large companies and promotes economic growth and social progress around the world.
Bruce Brooks, Microsoft’s director of community affairs, says that the company’s contributions to projects designed to provide access to information technology among the world’s poor already account for more than 20 percent of its giving, which, in the 2001 fiscal year, totaled $36-million in cash and $180-million in software.
The company believes that the charter is important because it will highlight the role that technology can play in development and let companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies know what technology projects are in the works, he says.
So far, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are the only U.S. companies to sign the charter; six corporations have signed on in all.
