“We are in the middle of a digital revolution, which comes with opportunities, but also with responsibilities. We make every effort and have initiatives to take our services where they are needed, regardless of whether we are talking about people with different degrees of competence and knowledge, regardless of age, location, etc.

Orange made investments of 4.5 billion euros in 27 years in the network, infrastructure, connectivity and another 4.3 billion euros that came from the taxes paid by the companies included in the group. We invest about 200 million euros annually in the development of the network.

In addition to connectivity, in the context of sustainability we must also talk about infrastructure security and cyber security. We have collaborations with universities with a technical profile, but also with high schools in the country,” Cristian Patachia, Development and Innovation Manager, Orange Romania said during Sustainability in Business Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest and Sustainability Today.

“This year we initiated a program, in fact a national cyber security contest, we developed a platform together with our partners and I believe that this platform has reached almost all regions of the country. Children have access to content related to computer science, but also oriented towards cyber security.

We have partnerships to support the academic environment, the research side, but also to support associations and NGOs. Through the Orange Foundation, we invest in courses, training, upskills, reskills, we have various programs including those addressed to disadvantaged areas and for training children to accumulate digital skills. The Orange Foundation recently opened a second Orange Digital Centre, a platform through which we want to reach as many children and schools as possible in hard-to-reach areas. This center was opened in the Danube Delta in partnership with the Ivan Pataichin Association. We reached 45,000 beneficiaries in 2024 and we will reach 60,000 by the end of the year.

We have a collaboration with Bosch in a project financed by PNRR to support public authorities. Through the project started last year, which spans 3 years, 12 entities, including Orange and Bosch, 5 universities and 5 SMEs have proposed to establish a competence center on smart city and carbon neutral. It is one of the 6 competence centers established in Romania. We set out to have a dialogue platform with city managers from public administrations through which we can show that technology can help not only to improve the efficiency of energy consumption, but also to the development of electromobility.”