The Philippines’ leading fully integrated telecommunications company PLDT Inc. (PLDT) continues to lead the global telecommunications industry in championing the integration of children’s rights principles into business operations.
According to The State of Children’s Rights and Business: Benchmark Report 2025 by Swedish non-profit foundation Global Child Forum (GCF) in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group, PLDT achieved an outstanding score of 9.9 out of 10, retaining its spot for the second consecutive year as the world’s highest ranked telecommunications company and the 2nd highest ranked company overall, tying with Swedish peer Tele2.
The 2025 GCF benchmark assessed 1,806 companies across eight sectors and 33 industries worldwide on how they are integrating children’s rights into their governance practices and operations in the workplace, marketplace, community, and environment. Results provide data for corporates and investing communities to inform decision-making and help enhance environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and impact.
“We are proud to be recognized once again as a global leader in championing children’s rights in business,” said PLDT Chairman and CEO Manuel V Pangilinan. “Operating in the Philippines, where children and young people are among the most active digital users and members of the community, it is imperative to ensure that our business continuously makes a material and positive impact on their daily lives,” he added.
PLDT’s performance in this year’s benchmark builds on its established track record of advocating for children’s welfare through its core business, corporate policies, and programs. The company’s rating also demonstrates its continuing alignment with globally recognized standards for corporate sustainability.
“Protecting children’s rights is one of PLDT’s material topics and thus a key focus area for us. By actively managing our impact on children, we not only protect the most vulnerable today, but also foster the adoption of responsible practices that help future-proof our business and address the needs of the next generation,” said PLDT Chief Sustainability Officer Melissa Vergel de Dios.
Among PLDT’s leading practices include having child safeguarding and human rights policies, which govern all its employees and are under the strategic oversight of its Board of Directors through its Governance, Nomination, and Sustainability Committee. These guide the company’s conduct of due diligence and annual reporting on its human rights and children’s rights impact across its own operations and supply chain.
PLDT has also invested in a pioneering a Child Protection Platform solution that blocks online child sexual abuse and exploitation materials (CSAEM) URLs and prevents access to sites and online content harmful to children, leveraging its partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation and the Project Arachnid of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. As of end September 2025, the company has blocked over two million CSAEM URLs since June 2021 and prevented more than 679,000 attempts to access CSAEM sites since January 2025.
PLDT further engages in consultations and materiality assessments with children as among its identified key stakeholder groups. The company has been actively reporting on highlights of its engagements with children, which aim to understand and highlight young people’s insights on sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, child protection, and climate action, among others.
PLDT’s leadership in children’s rights supports the Philippine Security and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s active call for publicly listed companies to expand and enhance their sustainability reporting to include impacts on children.
The 2025 GCF benchmark is the world’s most comprehensive assessment of how major companies address their impacts on children, offering fresh insight into how businesses are moving from policy to practice. GCF bases its benchmark scores on a company’s publicly available information, systematically assessing a corporate’s response to impacts on children’s rights. Scores are not a measure of actual compliance with policies, outcomes of policies and/or programmes, nor should scores be construed as investment advice. Read more about the methodology here: https://globalchildforum.org/benchmarks/methodology/.
