We're empowering people and organizations to advance the
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030

Alongside the National Institutions of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Facebook’s COVID-19 Information Center has connected more than 2 billion people to reliable, accurate COVID-19 and vaccine information. Data for Good at Meta, the University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University also share information from the daily COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey conducted in over 200 countries and territories on COVID-19 symptoms, testing, mental health, economic security and vaccinations.

As the world experiences the collective trauma created by a global pandemic, climate crisis and political unrest, we need to support each other now more than ever. We have already invested in supporting people over the years by building tools and resources that help people manage their experience in a way that works best for them, including: establishing the Emotional Health Resource Center on Facebook with inputs from experts and partners like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), time spent controls with customizable daily time alert and mute push notifications setting to limit notifications as well as options to prevent abuse and bullying through comment controls features on our technologies.

Our technologies have enabled people to fundraise for nonprofits and personal causes; In 2020, people raised more than $175 million for COVID-related fundraisers globally on Facebook and Instagram.

Alongside thousands of regional partners, Meta has enabled more than 100 million people around the world to sign up for Facebook’s Blood Donations feature, which allows people to sign up for notifications from nearby blood banks about donation opportunities – leading to increased donations from first-time blood donors at partner sites by 19%.

Since the pandemic began, we’ve used our AI systems to take down COVID-19-related material that global health experts have flagged as misinformation and then detect copies when someone tries to share them. As a result, we’ve removed more than 12 million pieces of content about COVID-19 and vaccines. Since the beginning of the pandemic across our entire platform, we have removed over 3,000 accounts, pages and groups for repeatedly violating our rules against spreading COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation and removed more than 20 million pieces of content for breaking these rules.

Learn more about how we’re responding to COVID-19 and our efforts towards Emotional Health.

Our #SheMeansBusiness program, which launched in 2016, has equipped over 1 million women in 28 countries with training and mentorship to grow their business on our platform.

With input from partners and gender equality leaders like the World Bank, UN Women, Equal Measures 2030 and Ladysmith, Meta has helped to fill critical gender data gaps by running a global survey on Gender Equality at Home in more than 200 countries. Reaching a statistically representative sample of roughly 500,000 people who use Facebook, the 2020 survey sheds light on the challenges and opportunities for women globally.

Meta continues to prioritize Gender Data, fostering a growing community of data and gender specialists and offering free-of-charge resources: Gender Data 101 is an online course that helps people build basic skills to gather, analyze and share data in a gender-sensitive way. It is offered as a self-paced course or a facilitated five-week program with TechChange.

Since 2016, we have collaborated with the World Bank and OECD to survey over 100,000 businesses to date through the Future of Business Survey. These insights can meaningfully inform policies to support economic recovery and opportunity around the world, including calls for more support for women-led businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, our Global State of Small Business survey has given us further insight to how the pandemic has affected small businesses, highlighting the responses of 35,000 small business leaders, across 30 countries and territories that illustrate how small business recovery is underway despite inequalities and persisting challenges. Most recently, we have commissioned a study alongside Economist Impact that surveyed 3000+ GenZers and Millennials globally, to understand the impact of covid-19 on entrepreneurship and employment perspectives. With this research, we identify the factors driving young people toward (or away from) entrepreneurship in a time of prolonged crisis — and to surface implications and recommendations to provide businesses and leaders with the tools to foster youth entrepreneurship and employment.

As a company, we have worked towards greater business equality within our supplier base, committing $1 billion to certified diverse suppliers annually and having funded $40 million in grant funding to Black businesses most impacted by COVID-19. We believe that internal diversity is key to long term success and have pledged that 50% of our workforce will be from underrepresented communities by 2024.

By investing in access to educational resources, our programs such as Meta Elevate, Meta Blueprint and Meta Boost help small businesses grow on Facebook, Instagram and beyond by offering free digital marketing training, resources, events and other opportunities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta Boost offered a Summer of Support program to help millions of people navigate a rapidly changing marketplace with free on-demand online training, live sessions and conversations around topics like reimagining customer service, creative reinvention, going from brick and mortar to digital and more.

Our connectivity team collaborates with partners on initiatives designed to improve internet access, reliability and speeds for the 3.5 billion people around the world, mostly in emerging economies, that remain un- or under-connected. As part of these efforts, Meta has invested in partnerships and digital access infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, ASEAN and Latin America, with an estimated $200 billion in economic growth for these regions over the next 5 years. Additional investments include the 37,000 km 2Africa subsea cable with about 35 landings connecting 26 countries, providing critical capacity to the region and the Echo and Bifrost subsea cables connecting the Asia-Pacific region to North America which will increase overall transpacific capacity by 70 percent. When connected to the 2,200 km of fiber backhaul Meta is building with its partner in the DRC, the combined network will promote open access infrastructure sharing and improve reliability and speeds for 30 million people within DRC alone. In Pakistan, we are building 1,700 km of open access terrestrial fiber with our partner to help address the growing demand for urban connectivity for 10 million people across eight cities. And in Nepal, our partner is using our technologies in order to provide affordable access to more than 1 million people in the first year.

Facebook has launched the Climate Science Information Center, with inputs from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environment Programme and over 200 other partners, to serve as a dedicated space with authoritative, factual resources from the world’s leading climate organizations. With over 3.8 million global subscribers, the center features facts, figures, data and climate science news, as well as providing actionable steps people can take in their everyday lives to combat climate change. In addition, our technologies and programs have enabled more than 3.5 million people to donate more than $130 million through Facebook and Instagram Fundraisers to combat climate change and support environmental protection.

Messenger from Meta has deployed a Messenger bot, alongside the UN, to help people understand what individual actions they can take to fight climate change. We also share information from a global Climate Change Opinion Survey, conducted in collaboration with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, to provide decision-makers with a public view of climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences and behaviors.

As a company, we have recently announced a new goal to be water positive by 2030 – to return more water to the environment than we consumed for our global operations through water restoration projects that will replenish more than 850 million gallons of water per year and projects that may have a catalytic effect in watersheds around the world.

Meta is working to make the human rights policy real through a broad range of actions across policy development, products and operations with a strong focus on priority countries as well as the most critical human rights risks faced by our company. With over 40,000 people working on safety and security, our global content review teams in over 20 sites around the world review content in over 70 languages. Currently, we are developing a human rights training program for all staff and a series of actions to better support human rights defenders from strengthened policies to protect them from online abuse to measures to secure their accounts. In addition, Meta reports our most critical human rights issues, like risks to freedom of expression, to our Board of Directors periodically. And we will release a public report annually on how we’re addressing human rights concerns stemming from our products, policies or business practices. Our engagement with civil society groups, human rights activists and experts, academics and the UN is fundamental to inform our work and inspire our commitments.

In 2019, Meta launched Project 17, a partnerships-first commitment to accelerating progress on the UN SDGs. Project 17 scopes and implements internal and external partnerships to advance the SDGs, focusing on areas where Meta could drive outsized impact, starting with data and insights in service of gender equality.

Recognizing the transformational potential of private sector data in service of the SDGs, specifically improving the reliability and timeliness of development data, Project 17, in partnership with Data for Good at Meta, focuses on filling data gaps to equip over 500 partners with insights they need to inform decisions that help advance humanitarian and development SDGs.

To contribute to private sector partnerships that advance the SDGs, Meta is a member of 2030 Vision, an initiative co-chaired by the World Economic Forum and UNDP, that strives to connect businesses, NGOs, academia and governments with the technology solutions needed to realize the goals.

Meta regularly works alongside the UN as a contributor to the UN General Assembly, facilitating important conversations about how the private sector and more specifically, the technology industry, can contribute to UN SDG progress.