admincompany has submitted its indigenisation and economic empowerment proposals to Government and awaits a response.
The empowerment plan entails nationwide empowerment of small dairy farmers. It will be largely inclined towards economically uplifting women and young entrepreneurs.
Foreign-owned firms are required in terms of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act to localise at least 51 percent of their shareholding by ceding for value the required threshold to black Zimbabweans.
The company’s corporate affairs and communications manager, Mr Farai Munetsi, spoke of the project during a recent tour of Nestle India Limited.
He said Nestle Zimbabwe would use the empowerment of smallholder dairy farmers as an integral part of its efforts to create shared value mutually beneficial to all stakeholders.
He said while Nestle Zimbabwe had started implementing the Swiss group’s share value and empowerment programmes, to be introduced across all the markets in
which the Nestle Group operates, it had not incorporated certain features of the successful model used by Nestle India Limited.
Over the past seven years, Nestle India has been assisting smallholder farmers with technical expertise on dairy farming, including hygiene standards, animal care and the setting up of relevant dairy infrastructure.
But Nestle India also works closely with large-scale farmers in the Indian market.
The Indian firm has largely been biased towards the training of farmers who do most of the work related to the welfare of dairy cows.
It has so far trained more than 350 000 women dairy farmers and also identified about 3 500 collection agents in what promises to transform impoverished communities.
Smallholder farmers supply between 80 and 90 percent of the 1,6 million litres that Nestle India collects from farmers daily.
But this is despite the fact that in India farmers have to buy dairy cows on their own, while in Zimbabwe farmers would be assisted under a US$14 million heifer procurement programme.
The programme was commissioned in Kwekwe last year when about 300 heifers were procured and some distributed among identified farmers.
A total of 8 000 heifers will be imported from South Africa.
“We need to set up collection points for small farmers,” said Mr Munetsi. “We are doing well on the large-scale side. But it is with the smallholder farmers that we have not done well. We will have large-scale farmers as our hub, surrounded by small farmers. Small farmers will deliver the milk to the commercial farmers.”
At Nestle India’s Moga Factory in Punjab City, agriculture executive Mrs Aman Bajaj said women rendered most of the animal health care in India.
The company had seen it fit to equip the women with the technical expertise that is now supporting many livelihoods in one of Asia’s most populous nations.
“All this is part of our programme to create shared value with the communities in which Nestle operates,” said Mrs Bajaj. “We train these women on animal health issues. We are giving them technical assistance. It is part of our women empowerment programmes, which we have been conducting since 2003.”
For the same reason, Nestle Zimbabwe has identified about 25 women in Mashonaland East Province who are set to benefit under its dairy farmers’ empowerment programme.
Discussions have started with Provincial Governor Aeneas Chigwedere on how the programme would be implemented.
So far, more than 350 heifers have been distributed across the country. When the programme has run its course, after the seven-year period, Nestle expects to be able to collect more than 28 million litres of milk annually.
Under its new shared value strategy in India, Nestle has also been facilitating the installation of piped water at various schools in Indian villages and has thus far covered 116 primary schools.
In Zimbabwe Nestle is funding nutrition, the Aids campaign and primary school athletics, among other shared value projects.
Online Reporter