Social commitment

We take on social responsibility: We are involved in diverse projects worldwide, especially in the communities where our sites are located. Our main focus is on access to education. In this way, we promote innovative capacity and future viability.

56.2 million

Spent on donations, sponsorship and BASF Group’s own projects

87,032

Participants in Kids’ Labs and Teens’ Labs worldwide

€377,000

Collected in 2015 year-end donation campaign

Strategy

In 2015, the BASF Group spent a total of €56.2 million supporting projects (2014: €45.4 million). Of this amount, we donated 46% (2014: 32%). We support initiatives that reach out to as many people as possible and have long-term impact. We foster education, science, social projects, sports and cultural events in the communities around our sites. On a regional level, we work together with universities, schools and nonprofit organizations. We support BASF Stiftung, a charitable foundation, in its international projects with various U.N. and nongovernmental organizations.

Starting in 2016, we want to focus our social commitment even more on making an impact, and we have developed a new, global strategy for achieving this. We want to put life-long learning on center stage and define global and regional focus topics to which our activities can make a targeted contribution.

BASF Group donations, sponsorship and own projects in 2015 (in million €)
BASF Group donations, sponsorship and own projects in 2015 (pie chart)

Focus on education

  • BASF organizes 50th Jugend forscht national youth science competition
  • Experts convene for tenth anniversary of Offensive Bildung early-childhood education initiative

In 2015, 87,032 children and young people visited our Kids’ Labs and Teens’ Labs in 31 countries. We started a new experiment program in 2015 entitled “Keep cool!” in which 10,406 children participated around the world.

BASF hosted the 50th Jugend forscht national youth science competition in our 2015 anniversary year; 195 young people qualified for the competition with 113 projects. The winners were honored in Ludwigshafen in the company of German Federal President Joachim Gauck.

With the Offensive Bildung initiative, BASF and its partners have been involved in education in day care centers and primary schools for ten years. More than 500 education specialists discussed the initiative’s future and successes at an expert convention in Ludwigshafen in 2015.

As a founding member of the Wissensfabrik, BASF is part of a nationwide network of more than 120 companies and foundations that have been making a contribution to education and entrepreneurship in Germany since 2005.

Focus on refugees and migration

  • Supporting integration projects in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region
  • BASF Stiftung’s humanitarian engagement

BASF SE has already been supporting over 20 refugee integration projects in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region since 2014. These include language courses and integration programs for children and families, as well as theater and crafts projects. BASF’s global “Connected to Care” competition to promote employees’ charitable involvement also supported employee-organized integration projects. Connected to Care won the Human Resources Manager magazine’s HR Excellence Award in 2015.

As part of its humanitarian development collaboration, BASF Stiftung has supported various United Nations projects since 2012 – along with other international nongovernmental organizations – in their efforts to deal with the effects of refugeeism and migration. The company and its employees gave €377,000 to BASF Stiftung in the 2015 year-end donation campaign for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) supporting an education and integration program in Jordan.