BIC - 2018 Registration document

OUR ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND SOCIETAL RESPONSIBILITY

Our societal responsibility [NFPS]

Writing the Future, Together – 3.5.2.2. #5 Improving lives through education Challenges ❯ The UN Sustainable Development Goal no. 4 is “to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” It underlines the two key challenges regarding education: access to education and equity in learning. The latest UIS  (1) report shows that today: access to education remains a major problem: 263 million ● school-age children do not have access to primary or secondary education. Access to primary education has not increased in the past decade, with 9% of all children of primary school age remaining outside of the scholastic system since 2008; the quality of the instruction is a critical problem: more than ● 617 million children and teenagers fail to acquire minimum skills in reading and mathematics, even though two-thirds of them are in school. Approach ❯ Through its activities of designing, manufacturing and distributing writing instruments, BIC Group has long been involved in the promotion of education. Firmly convinced that education is crucial for the development of free will and independence, and to combat poverty, BIC has in particular been an active advocate of writing by hand, even before its importance in the structuring of children’s thought processes was proven. BIC has set the goal of Improving lives through education and has codified this ambition in the following commitment: By 2025, BIC will improve learning conditions for 250 million children, globally.

The Group acts through three channels: actions undertaken by the BIC Corporate Foundation; ● philanthropic actions (donations of products, funding and ● skills) undertaken by local entities for the benefit of their communities (detailed in section 3.5.2.3 below); coaching actions to help improve learning conditions, ● including awareness of the benefits of writing by hand in the learning and memorization processes. At the end 2018, the year in which this goal was launched, the BIC Group estimated the number of children whose learning conditions have been improved at 15 million through direct actions with children or through actions with teachers and parents. The BIC Corporate Foundation The BIC Corporate Foundation was born out of the Group’s desire to promote its civic activities and structure its philanthropic approach while bolstering its employees’ sense of pride and belonging. Its mission is to support access to education and good quality instruction, putting the emphasis, over the long term, on the funding of social entrepreneurship and innovation in education. It focuses on two main fields, namely reducing the school dropout rate and promoting equal access to education for boys and girls, as well as the advancement of environmental education. The BIC Corporate Foundation Board of Directors consists of nine members, six from BIC Group plus three external experts: Runa Khan, founder and President of the NGO Friendship; ● Marine de Bazelaire, Head of Sustainability Continental ● Europe, HSBC; Jean-Marc Guesné: Associate, Azao Consulting. ●

Unesco Institute for Statistics. (1)

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• BIC GROUP - 2018 REGISTRATION DOCUMENT •