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Community engagement Supporting community development
Target: Provide impactful support for community-building initiatives around the world
ABB has a long-standing tradition of active engagement in the communities in which its employees and customers live and work. As part of our 2030 sustainability strategy, we are reinforcing that engagement by providing impactful support for community-building initiatives.
Community engagement highlights
Community engagement highlights
ABB’s approach to community engagement combines strategic corporate partnerships with country-level projects to address local needs. We aim to assist the most vulnerable and to support community building in education, diversity and inclusion, and community healthcare, poverty and disaster relief.
Our largest program is a corporate-level agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which provides humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence. ABB also supports the World Childhood Foundation, a global children’s rights organization.
Education has long been a focus of ABB's community engagement activities. One of the many initiatives we support is a new world-class master's program in mechatronics engineering at Ghana's Ashesi University in collaboration with the ETH Zurich. The program aims to promote a new generation of leaders in sub-Saharan Africa who will take responsibility for sustainable development in the region. Since 2007, ABB has also been funding the ABB Jürgen Dormann Foundation for Engineering Education, which helps financially disadvantaged engineering students in 12 countries. In 2021, the foundation supported 93 students at 15 universities.
ABB Jürgen Dormann Foundation
ABB Jürgen Dormann Foundation
Wherever possible, we maintained our commitments to promote STEM education and careers, particularly for girls and women. ABB’s scholarships and mentoring programs continued in China, Estonia, Hungary, India, Sweden and the United States, among other countries. Many of these academic programs include modules that provide students with practical experience in real industrial environments and assist them in developing soft skills to enhance their employability upon graduation.
In 2021, we added three major new initiatives to the large number of educational, technical, entrepreneurial and hands-on training programs that ABB runs for young people.
Case study Supporting India's next generation of female engineers
In 2019, ABB India launched a scholarship program with the Lila Poonawalla Foundation (LPF) to promote more inclusive development, both in the workplace and the broader community. The program has been consistently and gradually expanded and now annually provides 200 scholarships to economically challenged young women to help them pursue degrees in the disciplines of their choice at engineering colleges in several regions of India. Each year, interested young women with strong academic backgrounds are encouraged to apply to LPF for the scholarships, which help them pursue careers as leaders in the fields of science and technology.
The new partnership extends well beyond providing the financial support that these young women need to complete their engineering degrees. The scholarship program takes a holistic approach and imparts additional technical training through structured online sessions with ABB employee volunteers. Through supplemental mentorship activities of this kind, the program seeks to help prepare young women for the workforce and develop their skills as future leaders. This program complements ABB’s support for other educational initiatives around the world, including the ABB-run Jürgen Dormann Foundation, which operates a scholarship program for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The foundation seeks to break down the barriers that prevent these students from entering careers in engineering and becoming future leaders in technology.
In 2021, ABB announced a new collaboration and a donation of CHF 2.5 million to help position Switzerland as one of the world’s leading robotics research hubs. ABB has long worked with ETH Zurich, a leading research university, across multiple disciplines. The new partnership provides support for ETH’s RobotX strategic initiative, launched in 2019, which is intended to serve as a global hub for research in advanced robotics. With its exceptional in-house expertise, ABB’s Robotics & Discrete Automation Business Area will support ETH’s ambition to train new talent and attract worldwide experts who can drive progress in a range of vital disciplines, including mobile robotics.
ABB already supports ETH’s research in the use of robotic fabrication in architecture and construction. Our Group helped establish the world’s first laboratory for collaborative robotic digital fabrication in architecture, which is hosted at ETH’s Institute of Technology in Architecture. Together with ETH, ABB also participates in a project launched by Schindler, a leading manufacturer of elevators and escalators, to develop an automated robotic installation system for elevators. Such a system would improve final build quality and ease working conditions for elevator installers.
ABB is committed to supporting and working with more than 100 universities such as ETH as part of the company’s technology ecosystem. These collaborations, which strengthen the ties between academia and industry, are essential to the future of innovation and provide students with new pathways to growth and employment.
ABB makes a point of investing in education in the communities where our people live and work. In 2021, ABB USA’s NEMA Motors Division announced a $1 million donation to the Peak Innovation Center, a regional career and technology center in the public school system of Fort Smith, Arkansas. The center is expected to provide a sustainable boost to the economic landscape of the region by offering innovative, career-focused educational opportunities in the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) disciplines. The funds from ABB will be used to purchase advanced manufacturing equipment, including hands-on simulators, project control simulators, robotics, and more. This equipment will be used to teach students about real-world scenarios using state-of-the-art technology and equipment.
A collaboration between Fort Smith Public Schools and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, the Peak Innovation Center’s educational programs will be available to approximately 43,000 students from 22 regional school districts. It will provide them with job-specific simulation training that will equip them with real-world skills for well-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing, health care, information technology, and visual arts or to pursue higher education in their chosen fields. The center will also help meet the reskilling and retraining needs of mid-career workers so they can build new skills and earn new certifications.
Across the world, we also made donations or provided services and other forms of support to vulnerable people and those affected by natural disasters, such as the 2021 floods in Henan, China, and the Ahr Valley in Germany. ABB’s employees were particularly active over the past year. Many volunteered in Mexico to support emergency responder groups; in Canada, our people contributed more than CAD 170,000 to address poverty, health and the emergency needs of local communities.
Among the many actions taken by ABB in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ABB’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee, along with around 200 senior leaders, donated 10 percent of their compensation or salary to COVID-19 relief programs for employees worldwide. We raised $3.4 million through this initiative in 2020 and used these funds in 2021 to provide COVID-related assistance across the world.
Over the course of 2022, we intend to conduct additional research and consultations to develop our community engagement strategy further. These efforts will include the development of a harmonized approach to volunteer activities and of KPIs to measure the effectiveness and impact of our programs.
