Read on to learn about some of the remarkable ways these normal people have been reaching out to their friends and neighbors to do what they can to help alleviate the struggles brought about by the pandemic.

From Samsung Call Center Workers to Emergency Fact Checkers

As the second wave of COVID swelled across India, the need for cohesive lists of available hospitals, supplies and other crucial information prompted Samsung to establish their Samsung Covid Support Group helpdesks. But the team quickly came to realize that their existing lists were in desperate need of verification – and fast.

In order to help overcome this challenge, five Samsung call center workers were called upon to verify the existing lists in order to allow people to access relief. Even as some of the team members’ own family battled COVID, the team set out to update the availability of supplies, managing to cut the lists to 20 percent of their original size.

Despite the daunting nature of this task, the team continues to verify and edit these crucial lists on a weekly basis. The information is being shared with both service providers and Samsung employees all over the nation who further distribute it to those who need it. The work of Samsung India’s call center task group demonstrates how a small, concentrated effort can come to help a lot of people.

Encouraging People to Donate Plasma Through the Power of Social Media

While donating plasma following the recovery of several of his family members from COVID, Samsung sales manager Manik Kanade was reminded of a key message from his childhood favorite book, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’, that centers around the idea of helping others.

Having understood how important plasma donation was to those undergoing treatment for COVID, Kanade was inspired and took to several forms of social media in order to dispel misconceptions about the plasma donation process, subsequently gathering a group of over 3,000 willing volunteers to help spread the message.

In April and May, at the peak of the second swell of COVID in India, Kanade’s efforts saw over 200 volunteers donate plasma to help others. Thanks to the network he has built in his area providing information and support about COVID relief, Kanade has become the go-to for COVID relief information in his area.

Distributing Food to Those in Need

Samsung partner Samsu Ali is the successful business owner of Chennai Mobiles, a chain of smartphone retail stores in the southern Indian city of Coimbatore. But he did not have the easiest start in life; as a child, he spent his time working odd jobs in order to prevent himself and his family from going hungry.

Understanding that the lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021 that the pandemic has precipitated would hit those who live on the streets the hardest, Ali is now using his position to help give back to his community. Having mustered 40 of his employees as volunteers, he and his team prepare food and distribute it through as many affected neighborhoods as possible.

As well as providing food for around 700 to 800 people a day, Ali is also providing groceries and financial aid to the people of his city. Ali is one of the many Samsung partners in India – whose cumulative store count in India totals over 200,000 – who have engaged in philanthropic work since the start of the COVID pandemic.

Delivering Food Made by Family to COVID Relief Camps

Samsung intern Yashjeet Varshney has fond memories of the community kitchens his parents loved setting up when he was a child. When the second wave of the pandemic came around and a neighbor was admitted to a relief camp for treatment with no one to feed his children, it came as natural for Varshney and his mother to provide food for the kids and their father.

Upon arrival at the relief camp, however, Varshney could not help but wonder how many of the other patients were in need of food, and so he and his mother decided to step in. With his mother preparing nutritious meals, Varshney packs and delivers them to the relief camp – all while attending virtual meetings as part of his Samsung internship.

Even contracting and recuperating from COVID did not stop Varshney, who instead got back to work at his family food delivery system as soon as he recovered with a renewed sense of how important the gestures he and his family were able to make were to the people in the relief camp.

The efforts of Samsung employees and partners in India to provide assistance during the country’s second COVID-19 wave show how small, coordinated actions taken in a timely manner can come to have a huge impact.

Along with the people-first attitudes of their employees and partners, the company itself has also pledged 5 million USD to help India overcome the challenges brought about by the second wave of COVID in the country, added new Samsung Smart Healthcare centers at government hospitals for faster diagnosis at government hospitals and vaccinated over 50,000 employees and their family members.

©UNHCR/Samuel Otieno

Given the ongoing global pandemic, young people around the world are having to adjust to the new normal of digital and distance learning, but for refugee youths, obtaining necessary tools to study with is harder than it is for others.

In order to provide affected refugee youths with better learning experiences, Samsung Electronics has donated 1,000 Galaxy Tab devices to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, which will be delivered to 15 locations including schools and community centers in Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya.

Providing Quality Education for All

The refugee camps in Kakuma and Dadaab are two of the oldest ones in the world and, as of January this year, host approximately 380,000 refugees. It is estimated that 40%, or around 160,000, of those living in the camps are school-aged children.

However, even though the schools in these refugee camps reopened in January this year after nine months of lockdown due to COVID-19, it remains difficult for refugee students to have access to stationery, textbooks and other necessities for learning – an issue that prevails even after the reopening of schools.

Thanks to the donated Galaxy Tabs, the tablet distribution rate per refugee student will be improved in these camps, and refugee students will be able to utilize the devices to participate in the school classes and tune into extensive digital learning materials.

UNHCR plans to utilize these Galaxy Tabs in its Instant Network Schools program, an initiative to provide digital learning supports to young refugees.

“The contribution from Samsung is a good practice of how a global company can help the most vulnerable people access to education with its technology. UNHCR Korea looks forward to developing partnership with Samsung Electronics now onwards,” noted James Lynch, Representative of UNHCR Korea.

Together for Tomorrow: Enabling People

©UNHCR/Samuel Otieno

“It is important for us to be supporting the youth in refugee camps, who are considered as one of the most vulnerable groups to be hit hard by COVID-19, so that they could continue with their studies,” noted Won Kyong Kim, Executive Vice President and head of Samsung’s Corporate Sustainability Center. “Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all young people is essential for a sustainable future for all.”

With its vision of ‘Together for Tomorrow! Enabling People’, Samsung has been and will continue to operate social contribution activities focusing on youth education and growth for their sustainable development, including Samsung Junior SW Academy, Samsung SW Academy for Youth, Samsung DreamClass, Samsung Smart School, and more.

The decisions have been taken after due consultations with various stakeholders in India and assessing the immediate needs of local administrations.

Samsung will donate USD 3 million to the Centre as well as to the states of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

In addition, to help the healthcare system that has been stretched over the last few weeks, Samsung will provide USD 2 million worth of medical supplies, including 100 Oxygen Concentrators, 3,000 Oxygen Cylinders and one million LDS syringes. These will be offered to the states of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

LDS or Low Dead Space syringes minimize the amount of drug left in the device after injection, optimizing vaccine usage. Existing products have a large amount of the vaccine remaining in the syringe after use. The technology has demonstrated up to 20% greater efficiency and if existing syringes were to deliver one million doses, LDS syringes could deliver 1.2 million doses with the same amount of vaccine. Samsung has helped the manufacturer of these syringes increase production capacity.

Additionally, as part of its people initiative, Samsung will cover the vaccination costs for over 50,000 eligible employees and beneficiaries in India, with an aim to safeguard their lives, as vaccine doses become available. This will also include all Samsung Experience Consultants, who work at electronics retail stores across the country.

At Samsung, employee health, safety and well-being are our absolute priority. To help employees and their families with information and access to medical supplies as well as hospital facilities and home-care, we have set up in-house facilities and teams across the country.

In April 2020, Samsung had contributed INR 20 crore to India’s fight against the pandemic. This included a donation to the Central government and support to local administration in Noida, where the Company had provided hospitals with medical equipment required in the preventive drive against the pandemic such as thousands of Preventive Masks and Personal Preventive Equipment (PPE) kits.

Samsung salutes all professionals working tirelessly on the frontline of this battle. The Samsung family, which includes our employees across India and our partners and their employees, stand together in this battle against Covid-19.

Samsung India Newsroom Link: https://news.samsung.com/in/

That was until Samsung stepped in, with the electronics maker dispatching teams of manufacturing experts to the companies to help them find ways to boost productivity. The Samsung experts identified system inefficiencies and helped address production issues by optimizing container molds and improving logistics and packaging processes, while facilitating automation of certain parts of the testing kit production process. Following Samsung’s six-week-long assessment and improvement program, SolGent reported a 73 percent jump in productivity. KogeneBiotech is expected to increase output by 79 percent when it finishes implementing the suggested upgrades at the end of August.

With its potential to drastically improve processes for the greater good, Samsung’s Smart Factory program demonstrates the importance of collaboration between SMEs and companies with significant scale and expertise. In the video below, we introduce the groups and individuals who are helping in the global fight against COVID-19 by producing the reliable test-kits the world needs.

As COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe, our thoughts are with each and every one of you. We know this situation has affected each of you differently and that COVID-19 will have a lasting impact on our society. Despite this challenging time, we also see hope in our resilience. We are demonstrating how, as a global community, we can come together – regardless of location or circumstance – to address what may be one of the most important challenges of our lifetimes.

In navigating these uncertain times, Samsung has an important role to look after our employees, support our customers, and aid our communities. We are dedicating resources to help those in need and help us, as a society, emerge stronger on the other side.

Supporting Our Global Workforce

We have established regional response teams around the world to provide our employees with resources and updates on the latest guidelines from health authorities. We have restricted business travel to only mission-critical journeys and have strongly advised employees to work from home where possible. Additionally, we have closed some of our facilities and stores to support social distancing efforts, where necessary.

In offices and facilities that are critical to providing users with the products and services they need, we have mandated health screenings and temperature checks prior to entry and have implemented regular deep cleaning. Across the world, we are considering ways to help our employees and their families that have been impacted by this pandemic.

We will continue to do everything we can to protect our people, who have been the core of our business.

Serving Our Valued Customers and Partners

The relationships that we have built with our customers and partners over the past 50 years are of paramount importance to us.

As our daily lives shift to working and learning from home, we are here to support you and your family with products and services that enable you to keep life moving and connected to those you love. We are here to support you online at Samsung.com with round-the-clock customer care. For customers whose manufacturer warranty expires while our services are unavailable due to restrictions caused by COVID-19, we are offering a one-month extension from the date repair services become available again*.

Giving Back to Our Communities

Since January, Samsung has donated USD 29 million worth of funds and goods to governments and communities that have been most affected by COVID-19 to help with their relief efforts, including the purchase of medical supplies and hygiene kits, such as face masks. We are donating smartphones to patients in quarantine to help them keep in touch with their families and friends, as well as air purifiers and other appliances to hospitals and quarantine centers. We are also donating tablets to educational institutions so that children can continue to learn outside of the classroom, and are making our CSR education modules available online so that children have access to more enriching content at home.

In Korea, among the first countries hit, we provided local authorities a company facility to operate as a care center for patients to assist with the country’s containment efforts. Also, our engineering teams are working with companies in Korea that produce face masks to help them boost production by improving factory layouts and manufacturing processes, and in some cases, are creating molds for mask production. Because of our efforts, one of the companies was able to more than double its daily production.

We will continue to use our technology and resources to address the urgent needs of those working to combat the threat and impact of COVID-19. This is based on one unwavering principle that has guided us through our history: to create technology that contributes to a better global society.

Now, more than ever, we must band together to not only overcome this challenge, but emerge stronger, together. This is a challenging time for us all and we will continue to share updates with you as the situation evolves. For now, we sincerely thank every one of our employees for all they are doing, and, in particular, for the support they are providing to each other, to our partners and to our customers.

To our customers, partners, and communities, we are grateful for your loyal support, and we promise to stand strong with you as we all look ahead to a promising future.

From all of us at Samsung, we wish you, your families, and your friends stay strong and in good health.

* More details will be shared on Samsung.com