Women’s Empowerment at Nestlé

In May 2013, Nestlé signed up to the Women’s Empowerment Principles: a partnership initiative between UN Women and the UN Global Compact comprising a set of seven steps that business can take to advance gender equality and empower women.

These Principles will serve as a guide for actions we can take to empower women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors and throughout all levels of economic activity, from the boardroom, to the workplace, and across the supply chain to the community.

“Gender equality and women’s empowerment are very important,” says Paul Bulcke, Nestlé’s Chief Executive Officer. “We address this because it makes business- sense and we are determined to strengthen our business-related activities and programs to promote gender equality, capacity-building, and education for women and girls.”

In the marketplace, Nestlé has been able to provide 600,000 women with fundamental business and entrepreneurial skills in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

In rural communities, Nestlé has empowered more than 130,000 women with technical assistance and best practices in dairy farming and food safety by providing cocoa and coffee farmers with high-yield and disease-resistant plantlets. As part of the Nestlé Cocoa Plan, the “Nestlé Action Plan on Women in the Cocoa Supply Chain” is the company’s first commodity-specific initiative to strengthen our support for women in the supply chain. It was launched last year to focus on gender issues, increase the number of women farmers supplying to our company, and boost agricultural practices. The action plan is active in Côte d’Ivoire and will be extended to Ghana, Indonesia, and Ecuador. It will be updated later this year after the Fair Labor Association publishes its assessment on our cocoa supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire.

In Vietnam, the Nescafé Plan was launched with the support of the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. More than 37,000 coffee farmers – primarily women – were trained from 2012 to 2013. Nestlé aim  to engage with about 20,000 Vietnamese coffee households by 2016.

Tran Thi Mai, a coffee farmer in Vietnam, is already profiting from her Nescafé Plan training. The mother of two children has repaired the roof of her house, bought a new water pump, and installed a new electrically powered system to irrigate her coffee farm.

In Pakistan, the “Women Livestock Extension Workers” (WLEW) scheme is offering theoretical and practical lessons on basic animal health management. Livestock extension worker Naila Amanat had to put her master’s degree on hold and take over the family’s dairy farm after her father had an accident. She enrolled herself in the WLEW training and, in turn, has boosted productivity at her farm. Amanat is now head of the village representing 22 other female livestock extension workers. “I have vowed to fulfill all my responsibilities and will not let gender be used as a tool for discrimination,” says Amanat.

In the marketplace, Nestlé helps women learn commercial and entrepreneurial skills. Our initiatives include Nestlé Professional’s “My Own Business,” which was launched in Central and West Africa to create opportunities for unemployed young people. It also provides operators with the tools and expertise to run their own enterprises. Alimatu Mohammed moved from the upper east region of Ghana to Accra to support her family after her parents died. She joined the scheme to become a micro operator and is now able to rent an apartment, fund her siblings’ education, and hopes to establish her own business venture one day. In Brazil, the “Nestlé até Você” initiative is providing women with business skills and nutritional training to sell Nestlé products door-to-door. Antonia Ilza Do Carmo Santos, a door-to-door vendor in São Pedro da Aldeia in Rio de Janeiro, started working as a reseller before Nestlé offered her an opportunity to own a micro
distributor operation. Thanks to the scheme, she now owns two houses and ten cars to help distribute products in the area. “Success and prosperity came in the form of Nestlé and hard work,” she says.

All these initiatives were integrated into our operations well before we signed up to the Women’s Empowerment Principles. We undertook them because they made solid business sense for the relevant Nestlé category business managers. Based on this initial assessment, we realize that we will need to share and learn more if we want to move our women’s agenda forward, which is why we are determined to strengthen our business-related activities and programs to promote gender equality, capacitybuilding, and education for women along our value chain.