Ricoh is committed to solving social problems through our technology, products, services and human resources in order to contribute to the development of a sustainable society. As a global company, we are eager to make contributions toward achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to supporting community development efforts in developing countries. In addition, the future is in the hands of our children and young adults, and we aim to help realize a “sustainable society”. Society at large needs to work collectively to resolve various problems around the world that the next generation will face, and this means that companies must play a role as well.

In India, which has the largest population of young people in the world, a large number of children either cannot attend school at all or finish primary education. This problem is attributable to multiple factors, including a lack of awareness of the importance of education, low-quality educational services and lack of necessary infrastructure and supplies. In order to help improve this situation, Ricoh is making contributions to education with our products and services in cooperation with Save the Children with a view to helping the country achieve further development.

We provide our products and services to schools and prepare systems that allow recipient schools to effectively use the donations in teaching and information-sharing. We will also support capacity-building of children, teachers, local communities and governmental agencies, as well as establish an educational network involving them, thereby raising the quality of education in the country.

Through this program, we aim to enable more children to continuously attend school and to realize independent and sustainable efforts by local residents in the community to enhance the educational environment.

We have conducted support activities focusing on improving classroom lessons by promoting utilization of our digital duplicators as well as by assisting capacity-building of teachers, governmental agencies, parents and local communities. Our efforts helped establish a functional educational network, which is a mechanism by which local communities independently and consistently work to improve the educational environment, thereby helping more children attend school and complete their courses.

We will promote introduction of the projector and digital learning materials shown on the tool as an approach to delivering inspiring classroom lessons, which we believe is a key factor to raising education quality. Our program aims to create systems that ensure that each local government provides teacher training using programs we develop for introducing digital learning materials and related teaching methods, thereby helping schools continuously and independently work to improve education quality.