ISTANBUL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Turkcell (NYSE:TKC) (BIST:TCELL), only Turkish company listed in the New York Stock Exchange, successfully represented Turkey in the 8th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Turkcell, as the private sector representative, took part at the forum held under the leadership of United Nations Alliance of Civilizations which was established in 2005 by the then-Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s initiatives.
The forum held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 19-20 November 2018, and Mevlut Cavusoglu, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, represented Turkey. Also, Ahmet Akca, Chairman of the Board of Turkcell, attended “Partnerships that Work: Leveraging the Private Sector and Civil Society in Peacebuilding Efforts” session and gave information about the company’s community and human oriented projects.
Starting his speech by underlining that Turkey is one of the founders of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, Akca stated that respecting the right to live is the most important point of peacebuilding.
Akca expressed: “Today, Turkey allocates the highest budget in the world for humanitarian support and Turkcell continues working on projects that suit these merits. We take part and give support at every stage of education from primary school to doctorate degree. We set aside one percent of our annual revenues for student scholarships, building schools and university collaborations for social benefit-oriented projects. We open technology classes at schools, serve our Syrian guests with our technological infrastructure and digital services and we support entrepreneurship.”
Akca pointed out that they carried out projects aiming to create equality in opportunity for the disadvantageous groups of the society and the secret for the success of corporate social responsibility projects was to ‘institutionalize goodness’.
“Today’s world struggles with complicated problems that cannot be solved only by governments taking on responsibilities. In this sense, private sectors all over the world have important duties. Acting in this sense of responsibility, we established the Turkcell Foundation to scale up our projects to become more powerful, efficient, transparent, beneficial and to ‘institutionalize goodness’. We will continue to serve our country and humanity with Turkcell Foundation, backed by the strength of and trust invested in the Turkcell brand,” said Akca.