Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our ESG forum here in London. This is a city where a high number of ESG-focused investors are located and where we have operations and team members from our health and agriculture businesses, as well as TELUS International. I'm Robert Mitchell, Head of Investor Relations. Welcome to all those joining us here in London, and also a warm welcome to the many investors and analysts joining us virtually from North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Our team would like to extend our deepest thanks to the entire RBC team for their strong partnership on this unique event and for graciously hosting us in their beautiful London location. RBC and Canadian Telecom analyst, Drew McReynolds, have been long-standing champions of our ESG leadership, including TELUS on RBC's list of best global ESG ideas consistently for many years now.
In addition to all the generous support he and the broader team have provided, Drew has kindly agreed to moderate our Q&A and panel sessions today. We have a very compelling program where a number of our senior leaders will discuss various aspects of ESG that support TELUS' global leadership and social capitalism, and how our social purpose of doing good in our communities is intrinsically linked to doing good in business. Jill Schnarr, Chief Social Innovation, Communications, and Brand Officer, will open with a focus on social. Doug French, our CFO, will discuss governance and environment and sustainability. Doug and Jill will then be joined by Geoff Pegg, our Head of Environment and Sustainability, for a Q&A session with Drew.
We will then shift gears to a panel featuring our unique tech-oriented growth businesses, where Juggy Sihota, Chief Growth Officer for TELUS Health, will discuss how we are revolutionizing healthcare. Paul Wietecha, Global Head of Consumer Goods and TELUS Agriculture, will talk about the impact we are making in that space. Finally, Darren Entwistle, President and CEO, will offer closing remarks. A few housekeeping items. If you're joining us through our virtual meeting platform, you will be able to follow the presentation remotely. At any time, you can click on the Documents icon to access our annual report, sustainability report, and data sheet, as well as an impact report on our Pollinator Fund. Final housekeeping item, today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ from these statements.
The assumptions on which they're based and the risks that could cause them to differ are outlined in our annual and quarterly public filings. With that, Drew, I welcome you to the stage, and over to you for a few words before we get started with Jill.
Robert, I'm the equity analyst for RBC Capital Markets. I'm based in Toronto, and I cover Canadian telecom and media. I've been in equity research at RBC for since 1999, and that was, I think, one year before Darren was appointed President and CEO of TELUS. I've been fortunate to watch the tremendous progress that TELUS has made as an organization, not just on its core telecom business, but across its broader portfolio of assets, including TELUS International, TELUS Health, and of course, TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods. A quick plug here on RBC. RBC is recognized as an ESG leader among the top global banks.
In addition to being a sustainability structuring agent and providing advisory solutions, ESG capabilities within capital markets include an annual dedicated ESG conference, a number of ESG thought leadership events and workshops, corporate marketing, a dedicated sales specialist in Canada, U.S., and Europe. Within research, we have a dedicated ESG strategist, Sara Mahaffy, who regularly publishes ESG-focused research under the brand StratFI. Before handing things off, I do want to say a few words on TELUS, particularly for those who may be less familiar with the company. As a sell-side analyst, one of my fundamental roles is to help investors identify attractive investment opportunities within the Canadian telecom sector. TELUS is currently on our top 30 global ideas list, which is a list of our best long-term ideas that have the highest conviction within and across RBC Global Research.
Our investment thesis on TELUS is that 2023 is a pivotal turning point as the company enters a new era, having substantially completed a decade-long accelerated fiber-to-the-home build. As reflected in the company's industry-leading 2023 financial guidance, TELUS has emerged with a distinctively different financial and operating profile relative to most global telecom peers, with TELUS growing 2-3x faster, and with the company widely recognized, certainly in Canada, as ahead of the curve across the board in almost all aspects of telecom, from networks, to customer service, to execution, to digitization, and of course, ESG.
On the ESG front, if you've grown up in Canada over the past 30 years, not only are you probably a decent hockey player and you like maple syrup, but you're also very much aware that TELUS, more than most, if not all companies, has long put social change and community involvement at the very forefront of what it is and what it does. This mission and the brand are inseparable. I'm not an ESG expert. That may be obvious today in my Q&A sessions, but I often say that TELUS was ESG before ESG was ESG. As Robert indicated, TELUS has been on RBC's Global ESG Best Ideas list for several years and currently ranks as a top Canadian holding in actively managed sustainable funds.
With that, let's kick things off, and I'm going to pass things over to Jill.
Thank you so much, Drew. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm so excited to be here with you today to provide some insight and perspective on both TELUS's leadership in social purpose and our more than 20-year journey in ESG. I should know, because I just celebrated my 31st anniversary at TELUS, so I have been here every step along the way. Over the last 2 decades, TELUS has evolved from a Canadian telco into a global communications and IT powerhouse, with 142,000 employees worldwide and a market cap of CAD 75 billion. We are using the power of our connectivity and our technology to not only provide, you know, broadband and mobility services, but also to digitally transform other industries, such as business process outsourcing, healthcare, agriculture, consumer goods, and even venture capitalism.
Through TELUS International, we are delivering digital customer experience solutions to thousands of brands in over 50 languages across 30 countries. Through TELUS Health, we're leveraging our global leading technology to support optimal mental, physical, and financial health to over 67 million people across the world. Through TELUS Agriculture and Consumer Goods, we're helping to solve inefficiencies in the way we produce, distribute, and consume food and goods. Through our TELUS Pollinator Fund, we're evolving our venture capitalism to support for-profit, socially responsible, innovative startups, so that we can help them thrive in our digital economy. Taking a look over the past two decades, our TELUS operating revenues have increased 333%, from CAD 6 billion, as you can see in 2000, to an estimated CAD 20 billion by the end of 2023.
It's because of our focus on innovation and putting customers first that we've been able to strategically diversify our revenue and our product mix. You can see that just over a quarter of our revenues in 2000 were coming from data and wireless, and that's increased now to 95% coming from fixed data, mobile, health, and agriculture. Impressively, this strategy has also allowed us to more than quadruple our customer connections from just about 4.3 million customers in 2000 to an estimated 19 million customers by the end of this year. I think it's really because this focus on diversification is really founded in our belief that good business and doing good go hand in hand. In fact, at TELUS, we've defined our social purpose. This is our mission. This is our reason for being.
We leverage our global leading technology and compassion to drive social change and enable remarkable human outcomes, we call this social capitalism. What is that? Well, it's, you know, it's not socialism, it's not charity, nor is it really philanthropy. It's when for-profit companies utilize their core business to help make the world a better place. It's when companies take responsibility and accountability to address pressing social issues with the products and services that they offer. At TELUS, ESG is embedded in every single aspect of all of our operations, through to our strategic priorities, our values, our culture, and even our brand promise. It's really become our North Star to guide our actions, to guide our behaviors, and to guide our decision-making at TELUS about what we invest in.
You know, we believe that in today's socially conscious world, customers, team members, shareholders, they want to do business with a company that shares their values for community and environmental well-being. We cannot fully commit to our social purpose of empowering human outcomes through technology unless we are committed to empowering everyone equally. TELUS has become a world leader in fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture. You know, first, we offer incredibly inclusive team member benefits. It was back in 1992, over 30 years ago, we were one of the first companies to offer same-sex marriage benefits. We also today offer very generous maternity and parental leave. We even offer coverage for gender affirmation and fertility treatments if needed.
One of the best parts, and the one that I most appreciate from a TELUS, a benefit perspective, is we give every employee CAD 5,000 annually in mental health and counseling support. It's there when it's needed. Moving to the next pillar, we have 6 global team member resource groups. The first is Connections, our TELUS Women's Network. We have Abilities, and that's for all team members at TELUS of differing abilities. We also offer Mosaic, which is for our team members who are new immigrants to Canada. We have Eagles, which is for our team members who identify as Indigenous. We have Reach, which is for our Black team members, we also have Spectrum for our LGBTQ+ team members at TELUS.
These team member resource groups are also overseen by a D&I advisory council. One of the best parts about the council and these resource groups is they hold TELUS accountable for continuing to ensure that we're a leader in creating our inclusive workplaces. I'm happy to say that actually, Juggy and I founded Connections, the TELUS Women's Network, over 19 years ago, in 2004. We were also the first Canadian company to develop a Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan, we did that in consultation with Indigenous peoples all across Canada. The foundation of that plan is connectivity. TELUS has actually connected over 700 Indigenous nations with our world-leading broadband connectivity right directly to their nation and lands. I talked about female representation and leadership.
We have incredible leading female representation. One of the best parts about working at TELUS is that 45% of our board is made up of female representation, along with three people who actually identify as Indigenous and racialized. This is amazing because we know that these people are making the right decisions at the board table. They're holding others accountable. They're representative of the communities where we live, work, and serve. In addition, 40% of our leadership is female, and another amazing thing is we have a leadership development funnel, where we, you know, help to develop new leaders, and 55% of the people in that funnel are women. We're definitely paving the way. Of course, we have a fantastic employer brand that attracts top talent to TELUS.
By way of example, in fact, we have a Share Love campaign that showcases TELUS's long-standing support of Pride and our LGBTQ+ team members. TELUS has also been recognized as Best Diversity Employer, Best Employer for Young People, and a whole host of other accolades. Our stellar employer brand is also made possible through our world-leading network superiority. Really, you know, reliable networks are the backbone of digital economies all over the world. This past year, TELUS again earned global accolades, ranking number one for speed, quality, user experience, and coverage from external third parties. That includes UK-based Opensignal, US-based Ookla and PCMag, and Canada-based Tutela. These results actually make TELUS Canada's most awarded network for 12 consecutive years. Our technology and connectivity are also critical elements to help make our planet healthier.
You know, broadband infrastructure actually plays quite a vital role in combating climate change and can enable incredibly 20% reduction in a country's greenhouse gas emissions. You know, our world-leading networks are allowing Canadians to live, work, and learn from anywhere, and they enable a range of low-carbon or zero-carbon behaviors, including remote work and learning, virtual healthcare, precision agriculture, and smart manufacturing. Not only are we a leader in DEI and in network superiority, TELUS has actually been recognized as the most giving company in the world. In 2022 alone, we gave an unprecedented CAD 125 million, more than the collective contributions of all of our peers put together.
I think while most companies strive to give 1% of their pre-tax profits, for the last 3 years, TELUS has given 5% of our pre-tax profits, and we will continue to do so. I think even more importantly, we contributed 1.44 million volunteer hours. That is more than any other company in the world. No other company comes close to reporting as many volunteer hours as we do, and the closest company that we could find, and it's one of the world's largest tech firms, they reported less than half. You know, we were able to achieve that goal because of our signature event that we call TELUS Days of Giving. We achieved 80,000 global volunteers participating this year. Let's play a quick video that highlights the global impact of TELUS Days of Giving. Awesome.
Okay, TELUS has become the global leader in social capitalism because of our two decades of consistent strategic execution. Since 2000, these are incredible numbers, the TELUS team has generously given CAD 1.6 billion and 2.2 million days of global volunteerism, which is truly an unparalleled legacy of giving. Additionally, through our TELUS Friendly Future Foundation, we have contributed more than CAD 100 million in local grants all over the world to support local grassroots charities in need. We actually created the TELUS Friendly Future Foundation with a CAD 150 million share endowment from TELUS. The foundation is able to actually operate each year because they live off the annual dividend income associated with those TELUS shares. They help over 2 million youth to thrive and to become the leaders of tomorrow.
I thought I'd showcase some incredible stories and examples of the grants that our foundation has given out. The first is The Boundless School. This is an incredible school that's located on about 600 acres of wilderness in Ontario, in Canada. Really, this school actually attracts kids who have been unsuccessful in traditional classroom environments. They've generally failed or not been able to thrive in those environments. They come to this school, and it's incredible what they've been able to do for these kids. There is a 96% graduation rate. More than half of these kids go on to university. You can see that just taking kids sometimes out of a traditional classroom can do wonders to help them to thrive if they learn differently than others.
The second example is RefuAid. They provide families who have fled their homes in the Ukraine with tailored support to really build independent and dignified lives here in the UK. The third one is one of my favorite stories. This is the Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. They provide support to children with severe speech and motor impairments through innovative technology. Olivia, who you see pictured here, she has Rett syndrome, which is a genetic condition where a child progressively loses their ability to speak and to move. Through our grant, Olivia now has what you can see here, a pediatric brain-computer interface. It actually utilizes her brain signals, so she just thinks of things, and it actually turns them into commands and makes them happen.
She can play fetch with her dog, or she can move her wheelchair, or she can play games with her sister, and it has truly changed her life. Let's play a video that showcases Olivia's story.
Olivia is fun. She's patient, all around a pretty easygoing kid. Olivia has Rett syndrome. She can't speak. She can't use her hands. With the support of the TELUS Friendly Future Foundation, Olivia has a specialized headset that is connected to her brain.
Brain-computer interface is a system that Olivia can use to control things in her environment.
Just think about pushing.
She thinks pushing or pulling, it converts that into action on the item that she's moving.
It's like something that you'd see in a movie in the future. You just start to think about all the applications.
It's absolutely mind-blowing to see what she was able to do.
I like it 'cause we're playing like normal siblings would. It's a lot of fun.
TELUS Friendly Future Foundation is changing Olivia's life.
An incredible story. All right, not only are we a leader in giving, TELUS is really uniquely focused on lending a hand to communities in crisis all over the world, we have contributed over CAD 300 million to humanitarian and disaster relief since 2000. By way of example, we immediately pledged CAD 150 million to support citizens and our frontline healthcare workers during the COVID pandemic, we stepped up in support of Iranian women's demands for freedom and equality. We also committed over CAD 5 million in support of Ukrainian refugees fleeing war with grants to the Red Cross and to UNICEF. In regards to floods and fires, TELUS has become, frankly, a critical lifeline when disaster strikes. We keep communications up and running for residents in affected areas and also for emergency responders.
Canada's worst fire season ever and the season has just begun. We've had a record 18 million acres of forest that has been burned so maintaining communications requires herculean efforts from our team, and that includes setting up things like our emergency management operations center, protecting infrastructure from fires. We bring in portable cell towers on wheels so that we can actually keep communications up and running. We also bring in hygiene items for people who are fleeing their homes, things like toothpaste and socks and other things that they might need in an emergency. Not only are we a leader in humanitarian relief, TELUS is actually bridging digital and socioeconomic, economic divides in Canada. We've connected 1 million people in need through our Connecting for Good programs. You can see this is Internet for Good.
This is high-speed internet to the home for only CAD 10 per month. This normally costs anywhere between CAD 80-CAD 100 per month. We offer Mobility for Good. This is where we provide free smartphones and data plans to youth who are transitioning out of foster care or to new immigrants. We also offer Tech for Good, which is where we actually create specialized technology to help people with disabilities actually connect to broadband, and we have helped so many people, whether it be low-income families, low-income seniors, low-income people with disabilities, marginalized youth, and of course, new immigrants. I talked about us being a healthcare company. You know, not only are we bridging digital divides, but we're also bridging health divides as well, and we want to ensure that everyone has equal access to healthcare.
We have our Health for Good mobile clinics. They offer primary healthcare as well as mental health support to marginalized people experiencing homelessness on the street. We offer this in 24 communities all across Canada. To date, we have provided more than 150,000 patient visits, as well as we've been able to administer over 30,000 vaccines. All right, finally, not only are we bridging digital and health divides, we're also investing in for-profit, socially purposed tech startups through the launch of the CAD 100 million TELUS Pollinator Fund, which is one of the world's largest corporate social impact investing funds. I've put down here some of the incredible investments that we've made.
The first is in Mycocycle, I wasn't aware of this, waste management actually accounts for 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions. You know, if we are going to beat climate change, we really have to find a new way to deal with waste and garbage. Mycocycle actually trains mushrooms to eat garbage and to digest waste, but at a commercial scale. Fungi can actually decompose materials that can't otherwise be processed, and these are things that are like toxic chemicals or petrochemical-based chemicals. It's shocking because in two weeks, fungi can actually transform, like a batch of old roof shingles into new raw material that can then be recycled and reused in construction materials. It's fantastic. The second one you see here is Virtual Gurus. This is actually a talent-as-a-service platform.
It's kind of like a dating platform. What it does is it connects organizations who need employees, who are looking for employees, with, you know, talented human assistants. The most amazing part of it, though, is that the majority of the talent actually comes from underrepresented communities such as women, LGBTQ+ , and they've actually provided employment for over 90% of women who are on their platform. It's just creating incredible employment outcomes. The last one is Flash Forest. You know, I talked about the forest fires in Canada. This is a Canadian reforestation company that actually uses drones, and the drones come in to regenerate areas that have been devastated by wildfires that are deemed too unsafe for humans to go in and plant in.
Over the past 100 years, the Earth has lost 1 trillion trees. We have a collective goal to plant 1 billion trees together by 2028, and imagine how that will help to fight climate change because trees are really the lungs of our planet. The last thing I want to note here is, while diversity of leadership is actually not a criteria for investment in our Pollinator Fund, we've actually been able to elevate unique and diverse perspectives. 42% of founders are women. Normally, women founders only get access to less than 5% of venture capital funding, so that's just amazing.
54% of our founders are actually led by Indigenous or racialized peoples, which is incredible, and that's more than 10x the average that venture capitalists normally fund. That is what's possible when you put social capitalism and purpose at the heart of everything you do. Our unwavering focus on ESG has also driven incredible operational and financial results for TELUS, I'm very pleased to hand it over to our CFO, Doug French.
Welcome, good to talk to everyone. Whoops! I'm breaking everything already. It's nice to actually have an ESG conversation that isn't tagged on to the end of a financial one that usually happens at our investor sessions. As Jill highlighted, ESG is absolutely incorporated to everything we do in our strategy and how we drive our operating results. Jill highlighted our revenue growth, we diversified that revenue growth both organically or inorganically and build assets of consequence. When we talk about agriculture, we talk about health, we talk about TELUS International, we've gone public with TELUS International. Those are assets of diversity and why we were one of the few companies in the world that didn't go negative EBITDA growth during COVID.
We actually were able to still grow and use our diversified assets, as we had, be able to leverage that, and not just on a telecom or downturn in any one given market. In the customer connections, we're growing in areas that, again, you're not seeing anywhere else. We're still growing in TV connections, which is, you know, unheard of in telecom, in any telecom around the world. Our local access phone losses are significantly less than any of our peers because, again, we're thinking of the customer and the customer first. Everything that Jill talked about on the principles and our culture are why we're able to manage that product portfolio, the way we have. Leading into environmental, which is part of my team, you'll hear from Geoff in a few minutes as well.
Drew, thank you for your comments, and we were ESG before it became ESG. We started reporting our environmental over 1990 or in the early 1990s, just to show, again, that we were an organization that was focused on not just what we do, but how we do it, and ensure that we leave the world a better place than where we started. That's you're going to see a lot in the themes of which we're going to be talking about today. The investments and initiatives we've taken in renewable energy are going to allow us to probably hit our carbon neutral target 2-3 years, 2027, earlier than our 2030 target. We're putting in those initiatives to drive that outcome to get better outcomes faster.
We signed virtual power purchase agreements significantly earlier than anyone else as well. Those power agreements through solar and wind farms are producing about 250 gigawatt-hours annually. Again, we did that when spot pricing of dirty energy was a little bit cheaper than the clean energy, but it was the right thing to do, and that's flipped. Those assets we invested in are now generating and on our balance sheet of an asset of over CAD 200 million, that wouldn't have been done if we didn't do the right thing in the first place. Marrying financial acumen with doing the right thing. Our Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG reduction targets, which are science-based, was globally leading as well.
That also was linked to our sustainability bonds. As you may be aware, we've issued over CAD 3 billion of sustainability-linked bonds, one of the largest, if not the largest, in Canada at the moment. During the last 15 years as well, we've launched what we call Work Styles. Work Styles was a program that we put in place for multiple reasons. One, to take into consideration our dynamic workforce. Workforce needs flexibility, and if you're going to keep and maintain the highest talent, you need to give them some optionality of where they work and how they work. 15 years ago, we started on mobile workers, work from home, and a dedicated in the office, and we'd sort of balanced that almost a third, a third, a third over the last 15 years.
What that's done, it's allowed us to rationalize our real estate significantly, bring down our footprint. It's allowed the commute, or the transport, or the commute to office, reduced significantly. Since it took me 2 hours to get from the airport to here, I know you guys know commutes and how that is important, that you balance and reduce the idling cars on a highway. From that perspective, we've reduced our footprint significantly by allowing flexibility to our team members. During COVID, we had 95% of our international workforce working from home in less than 2 days. Just again, another significant milestone.
When you expand that to our customer base, we've just hired a third party to measure what is the impact of all our products, services that we're offering our customer base that is also reducing their footprint to the extent. I don't think we'll ever go back to a dedicated in-office workforce. The fact that Canada actually got more productive during COVID because of the quality of the networks that Jill highlighted earlier, allows companies to be now flexible in how you actually work from home and balance your resources, and then reduce your overall footprint on travel time, real estate footprints, et cetera. Moving on now to governance.
On the governance side, again, we've focused on governance for a very long time, and our board and our executive are very much aligned on the importance of being a world leader in governance. Oversight is critical. We have 46% of our board is a new board or new members of a 0-5 years tenure, showing a rotation through that. We have a board skills assessment matrix and independent assessment of our board annually to ensure that we have the right leaders of our organization. 6 out of our 14 board members are women, representing 43%, and 3 of our board members are indigenous or visible minorities. Again, showing diversity, and that diversity is extremely important in a governance framework.
In 2021, we were acknowledged with the Governance Excellence Award with governance professionals throughout Canada. Just leading with strong reporting, leading with strong governance. We also have what get measured gets done. We have our scorecard in which both business unit and corporate scorecards have an ESG metric on it. Every single person in our organization's compensation is impacted with an ESG metric for the positive. Focus on cybersecurity and data privacy, we have a Privacy by Design built into our products and our networks as we launch. It's a gate. If you don't clear that you've got appropriate privacy, appropriate security governance, then you don't clear into relaunch or launching your product or launching your network or product network within our framework.
Again, holding the team accountable of what matters. The outcome of all this is a lot of the accolades that Jill referred to as well. You'll see that we've been 22 years on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for North America and 14 years on the World Index. For telecommunication, we're the only one who was in the top 100 of the Wall Street Journal's 100 most sustainably managed companies in the world. Leading to, it has to start early. You have to want to build it in, and you have to invest in it, as well as have it as part of your culture. Corporate Knights top 100, we've been there 11x , and Canada's Best 50, we've been there 17x .
Again, just showing our continuous track record of performance in this area. Lastly, you can see sort of the evolution of the investments we've made along the way, and ESG has been a very, very significant component with that. We've been driving extremely positive outcomes and you would have heard a lot of that from Jill's presentation. It really focuses back to our culture. Similar to Jill, I've been with the company since 2000, a very long time, and we've always had the main focus of our team, our customers, our communities, focusing on the best networks and the best products to give our customers what they need, but leading with social purpose.
You have to have all of that, in a consolidated bundle where your culture drives that on a day-to-day basis. With that, Drew, I think we're ready to go to the Q&A, and we can get a little more detail.
Thank you very much, Doug and Jill, for great presentations, and welcome, Geoff, to the stage. For the next 25 minutes, we'll just go through and drill into a couple of these areas here. I think, Jill, I'll start with you. Just being an analyst on TELUS, I love the most awarded network comment, and Doug and Darren talk about just how good the network is, superior network leadership. Obviously, an alignment from an investment standpoint, but elaborate on how that network superiority plays into your environmental and social goals.
Yeah, I think, well, from a social perspective, you know, we want to make sure that everyone has access to the internet, everyone has access to our world-leading connectivity because, you know, that ensures. You know, connectivity is really the greatest equalizer, right? We want to make sure we offer ubiquitous access. Whether you live in a rural area, whether, you know, you might have a socioeconomic issue accessing the internet, we still want to make sure that we're bridging those digital and socioeconomic divides, so that, you know, people can still work and learn from home. That will enable people to thrive in our digital economy. I talked about our Connecting for Good programs. We're helping 1 million people in Canada that normally wouldn't get access to the internet to be able to access it for free or at very low cost.
I think that that's, you know, obviously changing lives. From an environmental perspective, we talked about virtualization, right? How our digital products and services enable people to go virtual so they don't have to commute, they don't have to travel in their car or on a plane. They can do things through, you know, virtual meetings. They can do remote work and learning from home. One of the amazing things about that is that that will help reduce a country's greenhouse gas emission`s by 20%. Another way is that it's also our fiber infrastructure, it provides an 85% less draw on electricity, which is another amazing thing.
What we want to do is ensure that we're working with our government to build a robust digital policy that's aligned with climate policy, because I don't think you can achieve your climate policy goals unless you are supporting the rollout of digital infrastructure all across the country. Everyone would have seen the news yesterday that Joe Biden announced Internet for All initiative and $42 billion being given by the government in the U.S. to provide internet to everyone by 2030. That's the approach that we need to take in every single country all over the world.
Super. I'm going to follow up on Jill's remarks. Doug, for you, a big theme in Canadian telecom, but global telecom, is the ability, once you have fiber, to decommission copper. Investment analysts all around the world are looking probably at TELUS being ahead of the curve, as you usually are, in how you do this, how fast it happens. I think from an ESG perspective, can you comment on what the benefits are and how this is a differentiator for TELUS?
Absolutely. Thank you. As Jill highlighted, the cost of running a fiber network is about 85% less on the electricity draw than copper. We have 70% less truck rolls to homes when they're on copper. Again, you can save on your emissions through your truck rolls. Outside plant repairs are significantly down as well. I think I reverse that, sorry. The house repairs are down 25, outside plant repairs are down 70. Again, still mixing through that, when we're having techs having to drive to either our customer's house and/or to the plant, that's reduced significantly. We're recycling millions and millions of pounds of copper.
That in itself, when you think about one ton of copper, to actually mine it's actually putting three tons of GHG gas back into the environment again. The fact that we can actually pull this out, recycle it's actually going to reduce the overall demand for mining copper, which again, would help on that capacity. We also look at our churn rates. Our churn rates are also materially lower for our customers, who are on fiber than copper. Again, leaving out, you don't have to have as many customer loads. Your customers aren't driving to the malls as much. They're very happy with the network and happy with the customer service they're getting with us.
Again, not giving them a chance or not giving them a reason to leave, which again, will be driving those benefits. At the end of the day, when we can shut off our COs, again, there'll be another power reduction within our company, and then the ability to do something with that land for greater purpose, which could be developing for affordable housing, it could be developing or selling for, you know, low-rise commercial type arrangements. Again, we're designing those with very environmentally focused builds, which would be LEED certified in some capacity.
Super. Before bringing Geoff, the guru here, in TELUS's initiatives, Doug, just first set the stage here on TELUS being a leader in sustainable financing. Obviously, you've issued SLBs. How important is this part of the ESG strategy for TELUS?
It's very important for us to put our money where our mouth is, and to show the investment community that we are absolutely committed to meeting those objectives. Setting targets, we'd set initially the GHG remission target, reduction target. We're actually going to be setting and adding incremental metrics to that to again step up to all the things you're hearing today. I would say it's part of our thesis to use this for again accelerating opportunities for incremental environmental opportunities. Again, it's putting our money where our mouth is, that we want to lead by example and not be a follower. Geoff, by all means, you can top up if there's anything I missed.
Yeah, the sustainability performance target that we chose for our SLBs, of which we've issued 4. Doug mentioned that earlier, and we're leading in that aspect in Canada. The performance target is a 46% reduction in our Scope 1 and Scope 2, or our operational GHG emissions, by 2030 over a 2019 baseline. As Doug mentioned, we are on the cusp of updating our sustainability-linked bond framework to a sustainable finance framework, which will provide other options. Yes, we will include other environmental, social, and governance KPIs that we can choose from when we issue further sustainability-linked finance options.
Let's shift back to you, Jill, and let's talk a little bit about the DE&I strategy, and we'll drive into that a little deeper. You talked about kicking it off in the early 1990s. That's ahead of the curve from my perspective. In that S of ESG, the expectations team members have for the business they work is to take a stand on social issues. How does that impact TELUS's overall approach to its DE&I strategy?
Yeah. Team members are there to push us and hold us accountable. I think we also have a responsibility and accountability as a leading corporation in the world with 142,000 team members, to lead in this space, to take a stand, to make sure that we're always, you know, doing the right thing. I talked about our 6 team member resource groups that have been put in place. I mean, Connections was 19 years ago. So many women have benefited from that resource group to enable them to, you know, be exposed to the rest of the organization, to get career support and leadership development, support all along the way.
As well, the interesting part is that also you want to showcase people in leadership roles to enable people to then see themselves in those roles in the future. When you look at our board being 43% women, when you look at the cultural makeup of our board, with three people identifying as racialized and Indigenous, that's amazing. It gives you such confidence that the right decisions are being made at the table because it reflects the communities which we live and serve. One of the things we also did as an organization is, we were, you know, very interested in trying to drive recruitment for women, because, again, we found that women were underrepresented in our employee ranks.
We did some data analysis and some studies, and we found that, you know, the pros we were utilizing in our job descriptions, right, on our career site, actually was turning women away. We changed the pros, and we were able to drive a 25% increase in female recruitment to TELUS. We also stay on top of, you know, training and development. We've had unconscious bias training, we've had respectful workplace training, and that is mandatory training for every single person in our organization. All this is important because it's not just the right thing to do, it's actually good for business. We have found that if you have a company that, you know, really drives an inclusive workplace, you are 2x more likely to actually hit your financial targets.
You're 8x more likely to achieve incredible business outcomes. That's really why we strive to be a leader in this space.
One of the themes that clearly has come up several times is the culture of TELUS. Maybe starting with you, Jill, but also Doug and Geoff, please, you know, please opine in here. It's easier said than done to get a culture all working in the same direction, particularly with respect to all the moving parts of ESG. Maybe just talk to how TELUS has been able to do this successfully as it's done it.
I've been here the longest, so I think I'm the wisest. I think it's been, you know, an incredible high-performance culture. One of the things I love about TELUS is working with people who are incredibly smart, innovative, and creative, and I think it helps everyone lift their game up. I'm always striving to be better because I see the other people that I work with and the incredible work that they do. Juggy is coming up here shortly. She is my best friend. We are best friends in the office. We help each other through thick and thin. We give each other career support and help in those, you know, dark days, but also the great days. I think it's that culture. Everyone feels it.
Everyone wants to be a part of it. It draws people to TELUS. As well, if you look at our engagement scores, we have the highest engagement score at 83% for an organization of our size in the world. We've been able to do that for 11 consecutive years. It just showcased that that culture permeates throughout all of us.
Maybe I'll just add, it's also consistency. We've had the focus on the customer, focused on our team ever since I started, you know, 20 years ago, when my company was acquired by TELUS. When you actually put customers first, it really comes easy to take that next leap to your team members need to be happy, or else your customers can't be happy. You then can take that next leap of faith that doing right in the community leads to happy customers, which also leads to happy team members. I think that consistency is been there for a very long time, and the team has continued to build on it, i.e., we motivate each other, when you see the good things that are happening. Then structure helps as well.
The environmental team being part of finance for me initially was a little scary. I'm investing in wind farms, and it's uneconomic at the moment, but it's the right thing to do for the long run. It worked out both ways. It worked out that it's economic and the right thing to do. I think the way we look at structure and the way we are a little bit more risk-tolerant to doing the right thing and initially out of the gate, and then executing like crazy to make it happen, I think is a differentiator our organization has that, a lot of others don't.
Yeah, that makes me think about how that there's an organic shift from in the culture to the governance side of things. You talked about ESG issues being embedded into our scorecards. We actually have business units putting their hands up to say: What can we do to reduce our Scope 1 or direct emissions? Embedding it there, what measures gets done, so to speak. We put in energy reduction targets within the business units. We consider the energy impacts on our business cases, especially when we're looking at our network builds and such. It's amazing how that culture, just people wanna step up and do what's right.
I lastly, just 'cause I'm in finance with you, is we have a hunger within our controllers across the organization to learn and appreciate how we can make these investments. They may be a little longer in term, but the flow through benefits over time are really positive when we invest in things like even a lighting retrofit, and it flows through to our utilities budget, and it reduces our greenhouse gas emissions, which is good for our customers and our communities.
Let's just elaborate on the corporate governance side, Doug or Geoff, you can jump in here. Always a critical factor for investors, as everyone knows. You mentioned accountability, and, you know, you have oversight on all the ESG initiatives that you run. I was reading the 80 pages of the 2022 Sustainability and ESG report.
Thank you.
I read all the pages. It's incredible to see some of the measurement tools you've enacted as well. Talk to the oversight and accountability that's embedded in the organization to make all of this work.
You want to go first?
Sure.
Well, I guess it starts with reporting to our board of directors on a quarterly basis, both for environmental compliance, as well as sustainability updates, including a review of our sustainability report. I think that's where it starts. It flows through to how we measure and improve the way that we measure and get access to data. We've invested in software tools, for example, to make our data collection with respect to GHG emissions, our environmental compliance activities, and that really helps in terms of that. We get all the independent parties to assure our data. That provides more transparency for our stakeholders. It's, it's embedded in what we do in terms of ESG. Yeah.
I think maybe to your point on reporting, there's a lot of organizations out there that report what they think people want to hear. We report everything for 80 pages or more. I think that the thought behind is we're transparent, we have nothing to hide, and we want to share our story, for better or for worse. I think what you're going to get from us is transparency leading to trust, leading to you know exactly what we're doing, and you shouldn't have to ask that next question again and again, I think would be another area of that governance.
To Geoff's point, our board of directors are involved, and the governance committee does review everything that we do on ESG from a policy to reporting perspective, and are obviously fully supportive to that level as well, and promote some of those opportunities that we put in front.
In terms of your ability to measure the stuff you want to measure, where are you on that journey and roadmap? Is it still early days? I'm sure there's always more things that you can do with data.
Yeah. Scope 1 and Scope 2, we're getting significantly very good at.
Yes.
Scope 3, as I mentioned in my presentation, we have hired a third party to now look at our footprint. We have a very, very positive footprint on the community. When you look at telehealth or virtual care, you look at some of the farming scenarios and automation we're doing to reduce 30% of all food ends up in the garbage, and Paul will talk to that in a few minutes, reducing that waste. You look at how we can automate the work from home, speed up digitization. I don't know about you, but until recently, I live in an area that doesn't have TELUS fiber, so I had to wait for the telco to bring me fiber.
During COVID, it was horrible trying to work from home with you know, spotty internet. We provided an internet which is second to none, in our footprints and our businesses, our consumers are benefiting materially from that, from speed and reliability, so that they can work from anywhere and do it reliably, if not better than their neighbors are. I think that, again, is going to add a very positive footprint to our environment, to the extent of they are also reducing their footprint materially, and we're trying to quantify that as we speak, and it's in early stages.
Yeah, you're talking about the customer's use of our product, but we've gone a lot farther on our value chain emissions in terms of Scope 3 calculations. We do have 2 Science Based Targets initiative approved Scope 3 targets. One is with respect to our employee commuting and business travel, and the other is with respect to our value chain emissions as well. We have kicked off a Sustainable Supplier Program, where we are working very closely with 150 suppliers who make up 90% of our supply chain footprint. We are encouraging and enabling them to set Science Based Targets themselves, but also disclose their emissions to the CDP as well. We're making great progress there, and improving our taking proxies and replacing that with real data.
We did acquire two small companies that do handset repairs and handset refurbishment, so that instead of your handset ending up in the garbage or ending up somewhere else, we're actually refurbing it and putting it back into the market again, at a materially cheaper price. When families are looking for entry-level phones for their younger children, and/or they just can't afford a CAD 2,000 iPhone, they can actually now have alternatives. We were the only ones in Canada to do that, and we've locked it up to help provide, that opportunity to, one, refurbish more, and two, to give opportunities for our customers for affordability.
Through that program, we've recycled 3.5 million devices.
Fantastic. Earlier, we talked about network reliability, and you brought it up, Doug, in your remarks. Data privacy and cybersecurity, obviously, big topics, on the ESG front. What's TELUS's approach here to managing data privacy and cybersecurity?
I'll start. You can add?
Sure.
We've built into our programs the Privacy by Design and Security by Design. In each of the gating processes, you need to have it established that as you launch that product, you will meet all the specifications of our security expert and our data expert, to protect our customers and protect our data. We've had training as well, ethics training, data and privacy training, which is mandatory for every team member that we have. Also looking and trying to prevent attacks and including, you know, we even do our own testing within where we will send out artificial phishing opportunities to our team members to see, are they learning, or do we need to give them more training along the way?
Being very, very proactive in managing the risk profiles along the way so that we can mitigate the risk as much as possible. We have a significant development or a plan that what happens if, and how quickly can you respond? How quickly can you bring whatever it is back up again, should something go wrong? We even did a presentation in front of our Board, which was almost like a mock scenario where something did go wrong, and it got escalated up to our Board, and now what happens next?
we actually did a 2- or 3-day pilot in which we went to the what if scenarios beyond just the preventative, so that you can learn along the way and then go back to the front end and compile or put in those new policies or processes appropriate.
Yeah, I'll just add, you know, TELUS is relentless in our privacy impact, security impact assessments. Any marketing campaign, any new website launch, anything that we do, any new product, we have to take it through very rigorous testing to ensure that we are, you know, protecting our customers, protecting our products and services, protecting our databases through this very rigorous privacy impact assessment.
Super. Just with an eye on the time, Geoff, I want to finish off, one for you. With ESG now being recognized as a material financial risk, companies face increasing regulatory requirements and supervisory expectations. What do you believe are the emerging ESG trends that companies will need to respond to, this year and beyond?
According to our most recent formal materiality assessment, led by a third party, water and biodiversity were the emerging issues that were identified. I think that our stakeholders told us that they didn't really think that TELUS had a huge impact on biodiversity or water, but these are very important issues to them, and I think that expands globally. In response to that, we have drafted our first water policy and also our first biodiversity and deforestation commitment. We're putting the final touches on those, and we hope to publish those in the next few months. That's in terms of emerging issues that we identify.
You touched on the ever-changing and fast-changing non-financial disclosure regulations, frameworks, and standards. Thankfully, I think they're coming together, and I think it's led by IFRS. We're going to see some impacts in terms of our reporting and disclosure, particularly around climate-related issues. Now, we've been disclosing to TCFD since 2018 in our annual information form. We'll continue to monitor the progress. ISSB just released their first 2 standards yesterday. We're absorbing that. We're closely monitoring all these changes, and we'll have to keep on top of those as we move forward.
Fantastic. seems like we've just scratched the surface with these three here, I promise to keep everyone on track timing-wise. Doug, Jill, and Geoff, thank you, very much for sharing your insights.
Thank you.
Okay, we are now going to shift to two parts of the TELUS story that are truly differentiated, TELUS Health and TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods. First, Juggy is going to discuss TELUS Health, providing tangible examples of ESG driving better social outcomes, healthier communities and workplaces. Following, Paul will discuss TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods and how it's also driving better social outcomes, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and sustainability across global supply chains. We will then, after that, proceed to a second Q&A panel discussion. With all of that, I'll ask Juggy to come up to the podium.
Thank you so much, Drew. Nice to see all of you. Hello, London! Okay, I'm coming to you from Vancouver, Canada, and I feel like I'd like to move to your city, so I hope that you'll have me. I hope you have really enjoyed the discussion that you had so far with my esteemed colleagues. I can tell you that I've also been in this organization for a very, very long time. I have been here for 28 years, more than half my lifetime. I know I'm with a bunch of financial people, so I know you'll do the math.
I'll tell you that it has been an incredible journey, and I'm a very proud team member, and you only need to listen to Jill, my best friend, and Doug, and others today to hear all the great things about our organization. It's really important to note that these are not words on a slide. Who we are as an organization from a social capitalism standpoint is in our DNA, and it always has been. I've spent 28 years in this organization in all of the growth areas of the business and in multiple disciplines across the business, and, you know, we have consistency of execution. We have social capitalism as a draw for even more great talent. That makes for better employees, better engagement, better execution, again, better results.
It's a virtuous cycle that we have been seeing for more than two decades in our organization, very, very proud to be a part of it. What I want to spend some time with you on now is I want to help share more details on how we are building the healthiest communities and workplaces on the planet. That's what we're doing in TELUS Health. This is a very important diversification of our business strategy, something that happened back in 2008, 15 years ago, you know, I don't think that there is a better example of ESG than our health strategy at TELUS. What we have been attempting to do here is take a look at what are the most pressing societal challenges that we're facing.
I'm sure many people in the room here have your own stories about how access to healthcare has become a great challenge. If you're not feeling well, you need to see a doctor, how easy is it for you to go and get an appointment and see your doctor? I know that firsthand, it's exceedingly difficult. It's getting worse. Primary care around the world is like an elastic band that is being stretched, and it's snapping in some locations, and it's snapping gravely. In Canada, we have around 20% of our population that has no regular family doctor, no access to a family doctor at all. In the U.K., you have practices that are bursting at the seams. You have more than 3,000 patients being registered to one GP.
It's very difficult to get access to your doctor even here. I have a very personal story as it relates to why I even got involved in healthcare, and it has to do with access to the right healthcare for my mom. I do not have time to get into the details here today. I have been told and warned on clock watching, let me tell you, so I'll have to keep it very brief. What I'll share with you is that my own mom was in the hospital, and she needed to have life-saving angioplasty. First, she was being wrongly diagnosed as having indigestion, okay? Which is another theme that we can maybe talk about in terms of how the healthcare system is actually treating women. I see nodding heads here, right? It's not designed well enough for us yet. We're working on it.
While she was in the hospital being diagnosed with indigestion, the last troponin test, which is a test basically to tell you if you have heart damage and enzymes are being released in your system, we were told that she was having a heart attack, and that was 12 years ago on Good Friday. She couldn't get access to emergency angioplasty in Canada, and I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe that that was the case. Anyway, long story short, when I talk about the fact that social capitalism is deeply embedded into the ethos of every employee and in our DNA, in our organization, I tell you that we're not just here to talk about the businesses on slides, it lives inside of us.
Our CEO, Darren Entwistle, actually was the one that helped save my mom's life, and I can help share more details on that when we get into the cocktail hour. Access to healthcare is a growing challenge. It's getting worse around the world. COVID has tested us in so many challenging ways, and many countries are getting used to some of those challenges, but we have a lot of work to do ahead of us, and access to care is one that we are absolutely taking a look at and driving a lot of change in. Secondly, what I'll tell you is that on mental health support, you can see a growing and increasingly an unmet need as it relates to stress, and mental health, and anxiety, and depression, and things of that nature.
The global healthcare systems are strained, and addressing those challenges is what we are perfectly poised to do, and in fact, we're already doing it, and I'll spend a lot of time on this later on today. We have a proprietary data set. We look at our mental health indices around the world. We evaluate and survey in 15 different countries, and we create what is called a Mental Health Index. We send a survey to employees around the world. We don't want to just think that we know what's going on, with respect to the mental health stresses. We want to actually poll and talk to people who are in a variety of different countries and ask them how it's going.
What we know is that the mental health stress around the world, particularly with employers and their employees, is getting worse, and you can see the COVID pandemic as an accelerator of that for sure. The rising costs of living are also absolutely impacting the stress that everyone is feeling. TELUS Health is already delivering services against the physical challenges of access, the increasing mental health challenges that everyone is feeling, and we're also offering support for the financial side of stress. Amongst the top 5 countries that are covered in our TELUS Health Global Mental Report, 46% of employees in the UK here are saying to us that they need more mental healthcare support. 43% are indicating that they are near a state of burnout.
There is an increasing need and the opportunity for employers to provide adequate mental health support and more than what they have been doing in the past. Through the period of uncertainty, workers are looking to be supported in ways that they have not received in the past. Employers have to adapt to make financial savings and investment plans available. They've got to be able to provide better healthcare support. The solutions that we have at TELUS Health already are making our employers that are customers of ours having healthier and more mentally stable employees. Choosing to ignore these risks issues, risks of loss of productivity rising absenteeism, elevated risks of burnout, and then, of course, poor performance and results for organizations all around.
The Edelman Trust Barometer, which polled people in 13 different countries around the world, what we know from that, including the U.K., is that 79% of employees now are expecting to receive better healthcare support through the benefits that are being offered through their employers. Government can't do it by themselves. That has been proven time and time again. There is an opportunity for businesses to support government in partnership, and that is what we are doing at TELUS Health. The gap in mental health and well-being between those over and under 40 is also really important to keep an eye on. Long story short here, younger workers have the worst mental health and well-being, and as the aging population group retires and leaves the workforce, imagine the burden and challenge ahead of us with these younger workers coming in to the workforce.
What TELUS sees here and why we got into the TELUS Health space, is that we see a growing set of unmet needs that our health solutions are fully equipped to ameliorate. At TELUS Health, we are uniquely positioned to leverage our technology and our talent to revolutionize access to care and improve the physical, mental, and financial well-being for millions of people around the world, and we're doing it already. We know that organizations that have highly effective health and wellness programs, they will report 11% more revenue per employee and 28% better shareholder returns. At TELUS, we know this also to be true firsthand because we demonstrate leadership in our own actions. You heard it from Jill, you heard it from Doug. You know what we have been doing as an organization.
Maybe you all want to come and work with us, and we encourage you to do so. We see what's happening with our own teams, and it has been a strategic business imperative for us, a vital element in our organization's ESG performance, to take care of our own team members. I'll share a little bit more about who we are and why did a Canadian telco become a global leader in digital health? I guess I get this question quite a bit. We have been on a very careful, curated journey to transform healthcare and to improve healthcare outcomes for the last 15 years. This is not new. We didn't start our services as a result of COVID.
We've been doing it for 15 years, carefully watching the ecosystem, building our ecosystem at TELUS Health, taking a look at what the challenges were that were unmet in the markets where we served. Why wouldn't a telecommunications company get involved in this? We have the infrastructure, we have the networks. We've been connecting people for decades upon decades. We know how to safely and securely move data so that it gets into the right hands at the right time, so the right decisions can be made. We've been connecting millions of people for hundreds of years. 100 years, maybe. I want to say hundreds of years. We know how to do it. We have the know-how, we have the team members, we have the commitment.
We've shared with you our social capitalism thesis and why it matters the most, and so it made a lot of sense for us to actually diversify our strategy and to do this. Our mission in our healthcare sector is absolutely deeply rooted in our social purpose, and we do have a deep desire to solve some of our generation's most important social issues to create better human outcomes. We really do believe, and you heard it from Jill, you heard it from Doug, that a friendly future is where everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic status or location, has access to the best health and wellness solutions wherever and whenever they need them.
Last year, we cemented our global leadership position with health, with the acquisition of LifeWorks, accelerating our vision of becoming the most trusted well-being company in the world by helping to build the healthiest communities and workplaces on the planet. I have to tell you, we have the most compelling group of assets in the world on this front. More than 115,000 clients, more than 67 million people across 160 countries in the world, are already putting their trust in us, and we are delivering unparalleled health and well-being experiences and driving 580 million digital transactions, digital health transactions on an annual basis. What have we built? I'll show you what we've built. We have the global leading innovation across the health ecosystem.
As I mentioned, you know, we've spent the last 15 years carefully curating and building our TELUS Health business. This has not happened overnight, and it is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you, and always with a focus on environmental, social, and governance principles. As many of you might know, patients, physicians, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals today are more connected than they ever have been. Our TELUS Health solutions and services, they drive efficiency and a collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem. We connect healthcare professionals, payers, and patients. We prioritize ESG considerations. We are reducing the carbon footprint by promoting equal access to care and always safeguarding patient privacy and data. Every time there's a digital transaction, there's not a paper being produced, there's not a paper being sent around someone doesn't have to drive somewhere for a doctor's appointment.
We are reducing the carbon footprint. Many of the solutions that we have today, like electronic medical records to clinician workflow and pharmacy management, remote patient monitoring, and most recently, during the pandemic, virtual care solutions. I'd also like to say that virtual care solutions, although became very popular during the pandemic, we were doing it before the pandemic. Whilst we were doing ESG, before ESG came into play, we were actually delivering virtual care before the COVID pandemic drove everyone to that solution. All the solutions that I just talked about reduce reliance on paper, minimize energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and they reduce medical waste, too, which I think is quite important, lessening the environmental burden. I think I want to spend a little bit of time talking about virtual care here.
you know, we understand that access to quality care and quality health care is a fundamental human right, irrespective of geographical limitations. Virtual care bridges this gap by leveraging our technology with our healthcare clinicians and being able to deliver care to wherever you are, whenever you need it. You know, if you think that an average doctor's visit maybe takes about five kilometers for you to go there and back from a, from a transport perspective, you know, we've delivered over 1 million GP consults, so family doctor consults since we launched our service. You know, and we believe through our own calculations, we've saved thousands of days of driving and millions of grams of harmful CO2 emissions as a result. Our reach now, after 15 years, is unmatched. One in every two doctors in Canada uses our electronic medical records.
More than 6,500 pharmacists across the country use our pharmacy management systems. More than 5 million people are using our virtual care services. The foundation has firmly been laid in our backyard. Now with the acquisition of LifeWorks, we are fully global. I want you to know that the solutions that you see on this slide, we're having a major impact. I'll make it really simple. Every 10 seconds, TELUS Health is delivering care to someone around the world. Every 10 seconds, an employee is getting access to a counselor for a recent diagnosis. Every 10 seconds, someone is receiving a preventive healthcare assessment. A business leader is getting a preventive healthcare assessment that they understand what they need to do to avoid having a cardiac event and going into sickness treatment.
A new mom is getting access to virtual care for her baby, who's just developed a new rash. Every 10 seconds, a senior who lives alone is getting emergency support from us because our technology detected a fall. Every 10 seconds, a pre-employment medical is happening for a bus driver who's responsible for taking our kids to school safely every day. Those are our services. We are delivering them around the world, and every 10 seconds, we're having an impact in improving somebody's life. We're designing the future. We're designing a future where care is where people need it, where they want it, and how they want it. People we know want all-in-one solutions. We know that what's most important as we look to the future is shifting from a remediation of sick care and moving towards prevention.
Our solutions, our data, the things that we have learned over the last 15 years, put us in a perfectly unique situation where we are the ones that actually can drive better preventive care. We have the full ecosystem in Canada, and now we've got access to the ecosystem around the world to be able to help everyone understand why prevention is always better than the cure. We've got the data, the insights, the solutions, and the services so that we want people to be well. We don't want them to get sick and have to treat them. The global healthcare systems are not built to be able to sustain that. Virtual healthcare, as I've shared, is the norm now. Can anyone ever imagine only ever having to go physically into a doctor's office to have a doctor's appointment?
Now, with the pandemic, you can see the benefits of not having to do it. Over 80% of the reasons why you would actually need to go see your family doctor, you can do that through one of our virtual care appointments. For people that are living in rural and remote communities, it can't even become more important for them. We have a situation with one of our patients that was experiencing what she described as weird symptoms. She lived in a rural community in British Columbia, Canada. Since she moved there, because the rising costs of living in some of the major centers is just not sustainable, especially for the younger population, she was forced to rely on a local walk-in clinic.
She'd line up every day in subzero temperatures and before sunrise, only to be turned away because the space for the clinic, the walk-in clinic, was always full before she got to the front of the line. A friend of hers suggested our MyCare app, our MyCare app is a publicly funded primary care service in the country, in Canada. Within minutes, she had a virtual appointment. She met one of our doctors. Within a week, she had blood tests and X-rays and important tests that she needed, and she had a suspected diagnosis, which was MS. Finally, she got the information that she needed so she could actually start treatment, and she had no access to that in the rural community that she was living in. I have so many stories like this.
I could fill the day with them, and it brings me great pride, and I'm grateful to be working for an organization that is bridging that and is revolutionizing access to care and making sure that people can get access when they need it, how they need it. We also know that data in the healthcare space, we know that this will unlock great healthcare outcomes, and we are in the business of protecting and moving data, as I've shared with you earlier. A great example of this is in pharmacogenomics. Pharmacogenomics take a look at the study of your body and your genome to be able to understand what precision medicine would be right for you.
You know, it's important to note, as Doug mentioned, protecting our customers' privacy and safeguarding their data is always a top priority for us as a telecommunications company, and certainly is a top priority for us on the healthcare side. All of our services are designed Privacy by Design, Security by Design first, and certainly under the guidance of our Chief Data & Trust Officer, Pam Snively. Our TELUS Health Wellbeing Solution, which is actually gonna be launching soon here in the U.K., is a digital health platform designed to help employees embrace wellbeing. Again, shifting to preventive care versus just the treatment of sickness. It is designed for them to embrace wellbeing and improve their overall health and engagement.
It's powered by machine learning and real-time insights and analytics. Our leading-edge technology gamifies the wellness experience, keeping employees engaged with their personal health goals, with each other, and also with their employer. What our research has shown us is that when they're highly engaged with this wellbeing app, they have up to a 50% decrease in the risk of serious disease. Further, engaged employees have a 41% reduction in absenteeism. As a recognized global health and wellbeing leader, TELUS Health is a trusted partner in workplace health space. We are working with organizations and governments around the world to help enhance the total wellbeing of employees and their families. It's supported digital-first. We have an advanced clinical network. It's backed by TELUS. It differentiates us from any other player in the world.
We believe that a friendly future is one where people all around the world have access to the best preventive health and wellbeing solutions. At TELUS Health, as I've said, we have the technology, we have the leadership, we have the expertise, and we have a bloody passionate team to make it happen. Every 10 seconds, we're improving someone's life with one of our solutions. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks for that, Juggy. I love the every 10 second statistic. You know, from the time this meeting began to when it finishes, it equates to about 1,500 people. About 1,500 people by the time we're done, will receive some kind of healthcare from one of the TELUS solutions. That is inspiring. Thank you for that. I'm gonna talk a little bit about what we're doing in agriculture and consumer goods. Similar to what, Juggy was mentioning, you know, a lot of people will say: Why is TELUS investing in that sector? When you go through the opportunities that we have and how to solve them through connections, data, insights, and technology, it just makes sense. When you couple that with our mission around doing good, it's compelling.
You know, in the spirit of time, let me touch on a few of these things. Just around the landscape itself, we have a lot of opportunities in the food supply chain. I'm just gonna touch on three that I think are among the most significant, but they're also pretty urgent. One is supply, two is the evolving consumer, three is just waste. Let's talk about supply. By most predictions, the world population is gonna reach just under 10 billion people in the next 25 years. Given the current paradigm, we'll have to increase throughput by 70%. Looking at natural resources, we will need three planets.
We'll need 3x the natural resource we have today, and we're gonna have to really make a significant impact on how we get product all the way from an agricultural partner to the consumer. That's kinda job 1. We need to do more with less. Number 2 is the consumers themselves. They not only wanna know what it is that they're eating, they wanna know where it came from, they wanna know that it was sustainable, and they're willing to invest in that. You know, currently, about 60% of all consumers, they purchase sustainable products. 70% of them say that traceability is a critical factor for them. You know, if today's consumer is demanding visibility to that, I think tomorrow's consumer won't live without it. Job 2, we've got to trace these products.
We've got to better visibility throughout the supply chain. Of course, third, and certainly not least, is just waste. I think you already heard about a third of the food products that we produce, they either go to waste or they get spoiled, or they end up in a landfill. It's not just the raw materials, it's the packaging, and it's not just the packaging that you ended up with, but it's the corrugate that was around it and the pallets that were on the trucks. As you go back through the supply chain, that waste is a huge environmental cost. You know, we can make an impact on that. This supply chain is very fragmented from a data point of view.
Some of the common themes you've heard all day is that TELUS is involved in connecting things, connecting through technology, connecting through data, driving better insights, and that's really part of our core mission. You know, so when you think about that, this is a CAD 10 trillion opportunity. If you go from agriculture all the way to consumers, it's a lot of money. We don't need to make a transformative impact overnight. Every little change makes a huge economic difference for not only our customers, but the communities they service. Our customers are as interested in ESG and in waste reduction and in supply accuracy and in traceability as we are. And in some cases, they are pushing us along. We have this really unique opportunity to connect this value chain.
You know, earlier in my career, actually, my first job was at a company called Kraft Foods. You know, we marketed a pretty big portfolio. We had shelf-stable products in the middle of the store. We made dairy products and protein products kind of on the perimeter. You think of that supply chain, and when we do supply chains, we always begin on the left, which I think is here for you guys. Agricultural partners, we had hundreds of farming partners, agricultural partners, and on the very far right, about 30,000 different grocery outlets and more than 1 million hospitality outlets. In between, we managed probably 100-200 different production facilities and then a vast network of forward supply centers.
Each one of those facilities had inventory, and each one of them was hampered with visibility for the supply coming in from the left for them, and then the demand coming from the right. Those facility managers woke up every day and wondered, like, Am I going to have enough arriving? Do I have enough on hand, and am I going to be able to supply what's on the right? To the extent we can inform those decisions and make more accurate forecasts around that supply, you reduce waste, you improve traceability, and you end up doing more with less, basically. The journey we've been on really just started 4 years ago. We've made 9 acquisitions, and as you can see from this slide, kind of left to right across that supply chain, where we're now a global supplier.
We do business in 50 different countries, and we're supporting customers and constituents, really, all the way from farmers on the agribusiness side, out to consumer goods retailers and consumer goods suppliers. That unique end-to-end approach is what differentiates us. Here at TELUS, you hear a lot about differentiation and having an extreme strategic focus on that. I think you'll see that not only in the TELUS Health space, but in our Agriculture and Consumer Goods space, an extreme focus on differentiating through connections. Each of our solutions, in and of themselves, are valuable for our customers, but it's the connections across them that'll really make the biggest difference. I think what I'm most excited about is we're just getting started.
I would leave you with a few thoughts around being optimistic, but being enthusiastic. Because these challenges, while they're daunting, we can tackle them. We can tackle them through data, we can tackle them through technology, and as Juggy said, these are patterns that TELUS has been after for 20-25 years. It's really not a new, novel thing for TELUS. It fits with our social purpose, and it fits with our pattern of leveraging technology to make connections to drive better insights through data. We're just getting started, you know, and the opportunities in front of us are not only organic, but there are inorganic opportunities as well for us to continue to find adjacent solutions that are complementary, that add more value for our customers, but also inform those decisions laterally across that supply chain.
I think, you know, as we've been intentional in entering this business, we're in a hurry, too. I think you'll see us not only accelerate our organic efforts, but also have a very big focus on becoming, you know, an even more integral part of the global supply chain on these on these businesses. Great. I think in the spirit of time, we were going to do another one of our fireside Q&As. Yeah, perfect.
All right. That was fantastic. Juggy, the over and under on your session was 55 minutes, so you did very well.
You're welcome.
Listen, that was great. I think what was certainly evident to me, both of your businesses are tackling pretty tough problems. It's amazing that you have the success that you have to date, but as you say, just getting started. The other theme that comes to my mind as a telecom analyst is just the alignment between data, technology, and connectivity. Pretty clear from my perspective. Juggy, let's start with you, and this was certainly well throughout your presentation, but just, you know, for everyone to understand the clear alignment between TELUS Health and ESG principles, go through each of the silos, if you can, and just pick some of the biggest alignment areas between those two.
Thanks, Drew. I think, you know, the E of ESG, every time we're digitizing a health experience, there is a saving of time, there's a saving of paper, usually when we're digitizing something that would be a paper transaction, and there's a savings of, you know... For the patient, in this particular case, there is a savings of stress for them as well, right? That's not necessarily an environmental imprint, but it's very clear.
Every time that we have, whether it's an electronic medical record, whether it's a virtual care appointment, whether it's a pharmacy management solution, whether it's a prescription that's being filled remotely, as opposed to having someone have to drive to the pharmacy to get their prescription filled, we're improving the carbon footprint of that experience. That would be, I would say, the most important aspect of the E part. On the S part, is there anything more prevalent in our life right now than the social aspect of healthcare? What people have experienced over the last few years is the most prominent example in our generation of where, you know, healthcare, unfortunately, has not met the needs that we've been seeing.
The commitment that you see from an organization like TELUS, and TELUS Health in this case, is clear: we are here, we're not going anywhere, we are committed to this. We have the tools and the people and the technology and the track record and the experience to apply all of that to this social challenge. I think what's really important here is we're not just making a business out of it. We know that we can deliver better healthcare at lower costs than what the government is doing today, okay? We partner with them. We're not trying to replace them, not at all. There is a very key supplemental role that we can play there, and we've been demonstrating that for them.
What you can see is we need to get even more engaged and more involved on that front. What's key here is that we're not leaving anyone behind. When it comes to the healthcare role and accountability that we bear, we are looking at the full spectrum of healthcare. You heard Jill talk about our mobile health clinics. These are clinics that we partner with charitable organizations across the country. They are helping reconnect people who are experiencing homelessness back into the healthcare system. We bear that as a responsibility. We feel that there's a role that we can play on that front at one end of the spectrum, and then we take it all the way across to employer care to make sure that employees are getting the best level of care that they can get.
We're partnering with companies to help them understand that if you provide better healthcare to your employees, you will have better engagement, you will have more productive employees, you will have better bottom-line results. We've been able to demonstrate that for them, too. The full spectrum and that full continuum of care is really important to us, and that's how we think about inclusivity. That, I would say, addresses the S part, I think, quite effectively. I will just give you another example. I didn't talk about it in my presentation, we offer 24/7 crisis line support through TELUS Health. We offered it just a couple of weeks ago in Nottingham with the situation that happened there.
Boy, oh, boy, are we being tested on that front because there's so much unrest all around the world that everyone is needing some access to a crisis line. That's also an example of where we can come forward, and we offer incredible mental healthcare support 24/7. I can go into a number of different examples where we've activated that, but that, I think, would be a great example on the social side. Then on governance, I'll keep this one short.
We make sure that we have the best quality clinicians that we can find on a global basis, the best quality mental healthcare support, the best quality primary care physician, the best quality pharmacist that we can bring in, and why wouldn't you want to join the mission that we are on at becoming the most trusted wellbeing company in the world? I can't think of another organization that comes anywhere close to the mission that we're on, and we're not just talking about it, we're delivering it. We ensure that we've got the best quality leaders on the clinical side, Drew, that are managing and watching and governing how we're actually delivering all of that care. That would be my view on ESG for TELUS Health.
Absolutely, fantastic. Juggy, thank you for the deeper dive there. Paul, let's shift to you on the TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods side. In the investment world, and in terms of TELUS' asset mix, probably the least understood kind of asset in the mix, but like you said, it's early days. In terms of the priorities of TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods, you know, what are the one, two, or three solutions that you're really working hard to solve, and just discuss the impact that you're driving.
Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for that. If you think of farmers or growers, if you went back, I don't know, 40 years ago, 1 acre of land would feed 40 people. Today, we can feed about 160 people with that same footprint. As we just talked about, we need to do a lot better than that. Our solutions in agribusiness are helping with application of water, application with pesticides. We're helping those farmers get a better yield, and really, data and technology is gonna be the key driver of that. For the longest time in that business, we've looked backwards to determine what to do in the future. We now, because of technology and some of the things that we can do with data, be much more predictive around what is coming.
There's, you know, lots of publicity around artificial intelligence and large language models. That is a business that is ripe for that kind of approach. We actually have a lot of information. We're just not connecting it across the devices and across the different elements of that supply chain. I think our big challenge there is to help those folks with their mission, which is to get more out of the property that they have and the assets that they manage.
In terms of other companies that are doing bits and pieces of what you do, what differentiates.
I think-
Telus?
Yeah. Well, I think our social purpose, as I think you've heard for a while now here, like, we are committed at the core to doing the right thing. What would you feel better about every day than waking up and trying to, you know, tackle the world food supply? I think from an approach point of view, our lateral investment all the way from the farmers and growers out to the retail market and the consumer goods manufacturers is really a huge point of difference, because we have access to the right amount of information on each step along the way. We just got to connect it now, and then we have to mine it for the insights.
Fantastic. I know Doug talked on a little bit of privacy and security of data. Juggy, back to you on TELUS Health, obviously a big issue in terms of healthcare, data and the security and privacy around it. What, you know, is TELUS Health doing to make sure you're meeting the high standards?
We're raising the bar even still on that front. We have great experience on the Privacy by Design. You heard Doug talk about it, you heard me talk about it as well. When we're approaching a product, a service, you heard Jill allude to this as well. She talked about privacy impact assessments. When we're launching a marketing campaign, when we're launching a product, when we're talking to a company that we might want to engage in a commercial relationship with, when we're talking to a company that we might want to acquire. I mean, what they're doing around privacy and data, and how they're managing it, and how we're viewing it, you know, is a very serious undertaking on our part. We have a very strong framework there.
When we don't do it after the fact, we don't do it after we've already bought the organization, or after we've actually got a commercial partnership, or after we've launched a marketing campaign. This is not a postmortem, it's more of a premortem, if you will. We do it by design. Privacy is in that way, security is also Security by Design. We do it at the front end and not the back end. I mean, we have been protecting customer data across multiple different disciplines and verticals in our business on the telco side for a very, very long time. We know how to do it, and we're elevating that standard even further as it relates to health data.
Amazing. Paul, I'll shift back to you, and, we only have a few minutes left here, just to stay on time. You've talked about the TELUS Agriculture side of the business and obviously a little bit on the consumer goods side, but specifically on the consumer goods side, give us an example of some of the value you're providing on that side of the equation.
Yeah, in that part of our business, promotions is about an $800 billion market, if you will. For a lot of our customers, it's the second largest item on the P&L, after cost of goods sold. Companies are promoting every weekend. If you think of, here locally, like Tesco, there's probably 25,000 or so unique SKUs on the floor at any given weekend. Up to a third of them will be promoted, you know, special price, and buy one and get another, or buy some kind of bundle. Those promotions are trying to drive demand, and they're not as accurate as they need to be. They're not as innovative as they need to be, and they're not as forward-looking as they should be.
Our solutions are trying to help our customers, with those challenges. How do you get the right product on the right shelf, in the right store, on the right weekend, so that we can meet the demand of the consumers? I think we're, similar to all the other TELUS solutions we've talked about, we're leveraging data, we're leveraging technology, and we're making connections to try and improve decision-making. For those consumer goods companies, it's really for them about optimizing their supply. They can make enough product, it just has to be in the right place at the right time.
Fantastic. Well, we're gonna stop there, but I just want to say on these two businesses, amazing problems that you're trying to solve. Growing up in Canada, knowing the healthcare system, dear to my heart on that one and making it better. Keep up the amazing work on both sides, and thank you for your insights today.
Thanks, Drew.
Thank you.
Well, one of the characteristics of the Canadian telecom sector that I often convey to investors is that Canadian telecom companies, by any global standard, frankly, are very strong operators and very well managed. Within a very high-quality cohort, TELUS is widely perceived to be the industry leader in both strategy and execution, and no question, Darren has been instrumental in establishing that leadership position, as well as being the driving force behind the company's obvious leadership position in ESG. It's a pleasure to pass things over to you, Darren, to close up the session.
Great. Thank you, Drew, and thank you to RBC for putting on this event that's so important to our TELUS organization. Also, I think it's pretty darn clear, after you've heard from some key leaders within our organization, that our leadership on strategy and execution has nothing to do with me, but rather the talent that we have cultivated within the organization. Everywhere I go these days, I hear about generative AI and large language models and black boxes, this, that, and the other. I'd have to say, as it relates to the subject today, you don't need generative AI to see the rather potent and synergistic correlation between social purpose, employee engagement, and our customers and communities first ideology. Those three things in combination are driving better societal outcomes and better business outcomes on a sustainable basis, that's for sure.
I've been in the telecom industry for a long time now. I started out when I was 16, I was a installer and repair person for 7 years as I put myself through school. I was very excited at the age of 16 to be given the keys to my truck, and a list of orders, and about CAD 500,000 worth of kit in the truck, and told, "On your way, young man, go out there and see what you can do." As I was leaving the home that morning, my dad grabbed my arm and said, "Wait a minute, before you go out, I know you think technology's cool, and you love what it can do, and yeah, it's kind of, you know, interesting to see how it can change society for the better.
Remember that at the end of the day, it cannot and never will be a substitute for human compassion and the contributions that you make as a human being within your communities. Secondly, as you're installing those products or fixing those products within the house, that's great, but what's more important is the long-term relationship with the customer. Listen to what they have to say, and don't do what they don't like, and do what they're interested in. The voice of the customer is a powerful thing." I was 16, it probably went in one ear and out the other. I think I also heard him yelling at me, "Don't screw up," along the way. It's been with me ever since.
When I think about TELUS' social purpose strategy, really it boils down to a belief that to do well in business, we need to do good in the communities, the local communities where we live and where we work and where we serve as human beings. The other thing that differentiates us is that social purpose is at the nexus of our organization. It's not an adjacency, it's not at the periphery, it's at the nexus of our organization. It defines who we are, it defines what we do, but perhaps most importantly, it defines why we do it. We're very serious about this approach. It's not philanthropy, it's an investment. We have taken tried and tested, hardened business principles and practices. We've taken our passion for strategy and our ability to execute it.
We've taken our operational grit to weather the ups and downs along the way, we've applied it to the social purpose. Lastly, we're not measuring ourselves according to our inputs, we're measuring ourselves according to the outcomes that we drive within our societies, and that's an important differentiator for us. When you think about how we have positioned the organization and what you've heard cumulatively here today, really what we're looking to do is significantly help answer the world's largest challenges, the most profound problems that we are facing as societies, and they are directly aligned with the commercial strategies of our organization. When you think about climate reparation, I think about, wow, what can we do with our broadband technology, the potency of our broadband technology as it relates to speeds, to symmetries of connection, reliability?
'Cause there's got to be a connection that works when people need it the most. We are driving the virtualization of our economy and our societies. This is having a massive positive impact on the carbon footprint. When we think about getting carbon neutral by 2027 or sooner, I would argue, as an organization, we're already there. When you think about the virtualization of society or the economy, what we're doing on teleworking, what we're doing on online education, what we're doing on online health, we're already not just beyond carbon neutral, we are now, as an organization, fully nature positive. What a beautiful symbolization of our brand in action. When you think about our broadband technologies, also think about the pervasiveness of our broadband footprint across fiber and 5G.
We are not just a world leader when it comes to speed, symmetry, and reliability, we're a world leader when it comes to coverage, the pervasiveness of our networks, and the affordability of our networks. We're not just bridging time and distance for better environmental outcomes, we're also bridging socioeconomic divides, the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the polarization of income distribution. If we can provide ubiquitous and affordable broadband connectivity, we give people an opportunity to realize their potential and go after their own personal definition of success. We like the saying that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. We can do something about that with our broadband technology.
When it comes to a planet where there's gonna be an increasing imbalance between the demand and supply of food, we can take our passion, our historical telco passion for data analytics, data insights, and technology, and leveraging generative AI to deliver better food quality outcomes. Food as medicine. Preventative health starts with what you put in your mouth. Leveraging data insights to deliver better food security, a greater sense of balance between demand and supply. leveraging analytics, broadband technology, IoT sensors, so that we can deal out food wastage through better management of the supply chain and the cold chain along the way. Then data analytics to deliver better longitudinal and genetic food traceability, so that people can make more informed decisions as to what they're eating. There's a beautiful symbiotic relationship between precision agronomy and precision medicine.
As we drive better outcomes on precision agronomy, we have better utilization of inputs, including, Geoff, water. Lastly, we have a public healthcare system that's ruptured, and in many cases, it's imploding. I do believe that technology can be the salvation of that, empowering consumers and empowering providers. When Negroponte wrote his book, Being Digital, in the 1990s, I don't think he thought that the healthcare sector would be an exception. I think he would have thought it would be leveraging that to the greater good. Again, think of what we can do with our data insights, with our technology, with putting Moore's Law on steroids, with leveraging generative AI for good. There's a lot of bad, but we can leverage it for good.
We can drive the democratization of precision medicine, whether it's bioanalytics, imaging analytics, genetic analytics along the way, to deliver, at the end of the day, a transition in healthcare from the sick care system that we have right now, where we're trying to tweak better remedial outcomes in a more efficient fashion, to a shift towards the prevention of illness and the promotion of wellness. Leveraging our information and our insights and putting it into the hands of consumers, of providers, of payers, and of employers. I think within employer-based healthcare, there's a huge global opportunity going forward, one that TELUS is well-positioned to leverage because employers are obsessed with the war for talent.
If we can have employers stepping forward, taking greater and greater and greater responsibility for a failing public healthcare system, not because there's some altruistic bent, but because they think it makes good business sense along the way. If they can take better care of the physical and mental health of their employees, then they're going to have better employees, better attraction of talent, retention of talent, better engagement, better productivity, better motivation. Will they be willing to pay for that? You better believe it. If you look at the TELUS organization right now, if we just reduced our absenteeism on average by one day across our organization, that is CAD 20 million of EBITDA. That's an economic model that we are willing to pay for. You think about the war for talent and the social purpose component.
At TELUS, the reason why we execute better is better people and better culture, social purpose has helped us achieve that. We do attract and retain better talent along the way. When we're on university campuses around the world, talking with the top graduates in those schools, this is the dominant conversation: "What are you doing to build a better world?" We are living up to our brand promise, "Let's make the future friendly together." Look at the hard stats. If you have a strong, sustainable, meaningful, authentic social purpose, you reduce employee turnover by 57%. You get higher engagement levels. As you heard from Jill, we lead the world when it comes to employee engagement, in no small part, thanks to our social purpose thesis.
When you've got that level of engagement, what do you think that means to the execution of the organization in serving customers? Better customer outcomes. Companies that have higher levels, sustainably, of employee engagement have customer satisfaction outcomes that are 55% better than the standard. Yes, there is a mathematical, a econometric model between social purpose, higher employee engagement, better customer outcomes, and better business outcomes along the way. That has been absolutely huge for this organization in the execution of our strategy, even in some unexpected areas. We've been doing M&A for a long time now. Years and years and years into both buying companies and integrating companies, no one ever thought that our social purpose would be so meaningful.
in terms of companies wanting to be bought by us, or as we've gone through post-acquisition integration, and it's a bump and grind, it's emotional, it's fractious, it's difficult. It is not an easy thing to do. A lot of times, people stuck with us through the post-acquisition integration process, not 'cause they liked what was going on, but because they believed in the social purpose of our organization. We've gotten better outcomes on the M&A front as a result. This year, coming up in 2024, I'm hoping that in our 19th annual TELUS Days of Giving, we're going to hit 100,000 employees volunteering on a global basis. I really hope passionately that we achieve it. Yes, it's fantastic within the ESG context. They think about the social outcomes that cumulatively, these 100,000 passionate volunteers, that they're going to drive.
What's within my brain is that, well, you know, when you let people pick their volunteer activity, we don't dictate it's a decision made by them. We encourage that people don't just volunteer as individuals, but they do it with their teammates, and they bring their family along the way. This is not volunteering where we say, "We're giving you Friday off. Go volunteer." This is all on the time of our employees. Yes, the social outcomes are great, but what I'm thinking about is, think about the engagement that comes from that, the collaboration that comes from that, the buy-in to the organization that comes to that. It's really embedded within the cultural fabric of the organization.
I just came from Amsterdam, where I hosted our Presidents Club, and our Presidents Club is for our top, top sales performers on a global basis. 160 people. Top, top sales performers, so these are meat-eating salespeople that are thinking about money all the time. This is a 7-star experience, all-expenses-paid trip to Amsterdam, have an amazing time. In Amsterdam, you can get up to a pretty amazing time. It was at their deliberation as to what the curriculum would hold. They said, "You know what? We wanna take 1 day of our all-expenses-paid trip, and we wanna go and partner with Plastic Whale, and spend the entire day cleaning plastic out of the canals of Amsterdam." Not just plastic, a lot of waste along the way, but pulling a ton of plastic.
We rented 18 boats, 9 in the morning, 9 in the afternoon, gave them all fishing nets. Away they went. That's what they did of their own choice. Every single person showed up. It was elective, it was discretionary, it wasn't mandatory. They chose to do their activity. When we asked for their feedback, the highest-rated event was not the recognition, the party, the entertainment along the way, it's the difference that they made. The individual from Plastic Whale was an older Dutch gentleman. As he was rallying the troops to get going, they're all ready to jump into the boats and do what they do, he said, "You know, it's interesting.
You Canadians, 80 years ago, you were liberating Amsterdam from the Nazis. Today you're liberating plastic from the canals of Amsterdam. I can guarantee that those people are gonna go and hit the ball out of the park when it comes to shareholder value going forward with their sales activities over the next 12 months. I don't think government is going to answer our ESG challenges, nor our generative AI challenges. I think it's gonna come from the private sector. Give you a stat that it's kind of interesting. We're rather passionate about what we do around the world and how we do it as a collective. Since 2008, the TELUS organization has built 12 schools in Guatemala alone. 12. You know how many schools the Guatemalan government has built during that same time? Zero. To me, that's stepping up.
During COVID, Canada fared reasonably well, I would argue, down to our private sector and what we did, more so than what was going on within the government levels, with the exception of the sacrifice of our public healthcare sector. It was an opportunity for us to be able to demonstrate what the potency of our technology could do along the way. It gave us an opportunity to illustrate the virtualization of our society, where commercial and environmental were merged together. We were ranked globally as the organization that leaned in and helped the most during that particular period, from the economic on telecommuting, to the philanthropic on the CAD 150 million donation that Jill talked about, to what we did at the societal level in online education and healthcare.
I think about that, and I say, "Okay, what else do we get from social purpose that would be interesting to investors? How is it making a huge difference in terms of the proximity, the emotive connectivity, the affinity that we have with customers and communities along the way? When a company has a strong social purpose, and by strong, I do mean authentic, sustainable, and meaningful, the empirical evidence is quite unassailable. Within that particular environment, people are 4x more likely to purchase the products of that company with that demonstrable social purpose thesis in action. People are 6x more likely to protect the brand, including our own employees. They're 4.5x more likely to recommend the organization to their friends, to their families. They're 4x more likely to trust the organization.
When you think about the dialogue that we've had on privacy and cybersecurity, I would argue that's pretty meaningful. They're 0.5x more likely to stay with that company through thick and thin along the way. When you think about the results that TELUS has generated when it comes to customer development and retention, you see that in the empirical outcomes that we post quarter after quarter after quarter. Think about it, when 2023 closes, it will be an entire decade, quarter in, quarter out, an entire decade where our churn rate on postpaid wireless is below 1%. Over the last 13 quarters, in eight of those quarters, our churn rate has been less than 0.8% on postpaid wireless.
Over the last 10 years, the average delta of our churn rate versus our nearest competitors, Bell and Rogers, the average delta has been 25 basis points. The average delta on lifetime revenue per customer has been 40% between TELUS and Bell and Rogers over the past decade. I think that speaks to demonstrable results that we've been delivering along the way. The other thing that hasn't come up today is the correlation with our brand. Our brand is a gorgeous alchemy of our social purpose in combination with our values and our performance culture, accentuated by our customers and communities first ideology. For us, in our brand, nature is our vocabulary. Nature is our iconography.
Our brand promise is: "Let's make the future friendly." That is a serious responsibility, so that when you think about how we position ourselves at the interface to do something about it, with the biggest challenges facing our planet, really, you can boil it down to something as simple is that we're living up to the attributes, parameters, and promise of the brand of our organization. It's kind of a poetic combination to say, at the end of the day, as we drive better social outcomes and, in particular, better nature outcomes, and go through carbon neutral into nature positive, that's completely congruent with the brand thesis of this organization. 20 years ago, our brand used to be worth about CAD 850 million. Today, our brand is valued by Brand Finance at over CAD 10.3 billion and growing.
When you think about Jill's slide of CAD 1.6 billion of social investment, I would say, well, a CAD 9 billion accretion in our brand value alone is 6x greater than the CAD 1.6 billion that we've invested in our social pursuits, and that's only one particular parameter. To close, when it comes to shareholder value, really the litmus test to say, "Hmm, is there a capitalism to go with social capitalism?" Prove it on a mathematical level, and prove it not just absolutely, prove it on a comparative basis. Show me not just the singular absolute return, but how you compare to the other investment choices that we have. If you're better than our peers on social purpose, it should show up in your shareholder value that you're delivering.
Over the last 20 years as an organization, our total shareholder return at TELUS is 1,372%. I would argue that that compares favorably with the... what was the Morgan Stanley Capital Index, now just the MSCI, where that 1,372% is 1,139 percentage points better. We are 925 percentage points better than the TSX. We are 993 percentage points better than the Dow Jones. We are 1,044 percentage points better than the FTSE 100, and we are 771 percentage points better than the S&P 500. Our activities on social purpose every year generate CAD 1 billion of incremental revenue because of the connections that we make, both direct and indirect.
We're not the only people with a social purpose thesis, and a lot of our B2B relationships go from being transactional to being partnerships fomented because of our mutual belief in social purpose. We get to then radiate further within those accounts and become more susceptible to competitive intrusion along the way. Lastly, when you think about, okay, is it something that pays off year in and year out? Well, when we started this journey back in 2000, and we take a look at the past 20 years, of the past 20 years, in 18 of those years on the MSCI rankings for total shareholder return, we are number 1 18 of the 20 years. The 2 years where we weren't number 1, we were number 2 and number 3.
The average annual delta between TELUS as the first-place finisher versus the second-place finisher, not the average, the average delta was 77 percentage points annualized over that time period, year in and year out. I do believe there's a symbiotic relationship between social purpose, employee engagement, customer outcomes, social outcomes, and business outcomes on a differentiated basis. When you see the passion that the team has, it's very real because everyone in this room can connect with some of these issues, whether it's income disparity, whether it's what's going on on the food quality front, whether it's broadband connectivity and giving people the opportunity to leverage our virtualized society, or someone on the healthcare front that's been at the receiving end of a disappointing outcome.
For me, I lost my father, my mother, and my sister, all of them prematurely, to errors in the medical system. When I think about digital, and to think in today's world, we can have a digital interface or prompt that says to you, "Are you sure you really want to delete this file?" Business as usual within our digital world. Yet I'm frustrated that within our healthcare world, when someone's administering penicillin and the individual has a medic alert bracelet on his wrist because he's acutely allergic to penicillin, the checks and balances, the digital interfaces, the automated processes, the oversights and governance that can deliver a better outcome, I wish they were ubiquitous. I think a lot more people would be alive. It's something that we can all connect to.
To close, thank you for all of your support along the way, because the things that have paid off the most for TELUS and our stock price owe their origins to what was construed as unpopular, contrarian, or unconventional at the time. When we started our broadband build and our fiber investment way back in 2013, I had a lot of people telling me, "Fiber's for breakfast, not the balance sheet." Those have been the things that have paid off most handsomely, and thank you for your support and commitment throughout that journey. Thank you also to the TELUS organization that took all of these ideas and brought them to fruition in a way that's helped businesses and helped citizens within our society. Cheers!