The CEO of MTN Ghana Selorm Adadevoh says the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be far reaching than was anticipated at the beginning of the year.

Mr. Adadevoh says the company has invested a lot of resources which is estimated to cost around ¢100 million to guarantee the safety and protection of staff and customers and to support government to cope with the global pandemic.

Speaking at the 2020 edition of the Annual Media and Stakeholder Forum, the CEO of MTN Ghana, announced that MTN Ghana along with the MTN Ghana Foundation has done a lot to make life more comfortable for its various stakeholders.

MTN invested about ¢29 million to provide the required measures to keep staff and the working environment safe.

An additional ¢72 million has been spent on interventions that have impacted customers whilst ¢6 million has been spent on initiatives to support government.

Specific interventions carried out by MTN Ghana include:

• Supply of PPE for all MTN frontline staff
• Provision of relevant tools to enable about 90% of staff work from home
• Provision of 45 buses to transport MTN frontline staff to their work locations
• Boosting Network resilience (50% increase in international bandwidth, 100 new sites); to support work from home, online school, entertainment and other digital activities.
• Provision of Free access to over 200 educational websites for several educational institutions     
• Offer of Free MoMo P2P transfers up to GHS100 daily from March till date
• Provision of Free access (zero rate) of the Smart Workplace portal for government workers
• Donation of GhS5m worth of PPEs for frontline health workers and 4 PCR machines
• Donation of digital equipment to Noguchi Memorial worth GHS42,000; and
• Distribution of 85,000 face masks to various hospitals and clinics nationwide
• Two-month behavioral change campaign urging people to wear face mask. (Be Wise and Wear it for me campaign).

Selorm Adadevoh also used the opportunity to confirm that MTN Ghana was on track to become a digital operator by the end of 2023.

The MTN Editors and Stakeholder Forum is held across the country annually to engage senior media practitioners and stakeholders of the business to share insights into the business operations for the year and for the future. 

Similar virtual forums will be held with the media in other parts of the country.