Nestle Partners Media To Educate Nigerians On Health, Economy, Environmental Interventions
Nestle Nigeria, the largest food and beverage company in Africa, is partnering with the media to educate Nigerians on how to make the right choices in the areas of health, nutrition, and preservation of the environment.
Speaking at the commencement of this year’s training jointly organised by Nestle Nigeria and the Lagos Business School Sustainability Centre (LBSSC) for journalists covering Health, Agriculture, Business and the Environment yesterday, the Corporate Affairs Manager, Nestle Nigeria, Victoria Uwadoka, emphasized the importance of the media in information dissemination and awareness creation.
While highlighting the rationale behind the partnership she said, “We need you to collaborate with us to provide the interventions that our people need to make that decision when it comes to their health, when it comes to nutrition and preservation of the environment.”
She said the training is Nestle’s way of appreciating what journalists are doing and their support for the company and the need to equip the journalists with the right information and skills to enhance their performance.
“We know with you our media partners and friends, this is our way of showing you that we appreciate what you are doing and also we believe in the power of what you can do. We want you to have the right information; we want you to be adequately equipped to do your job better, create more feasibility for your expertise and professionalism; put yourself out there as an expert; an excellent reporter, an excellent journalist; as an excellent publisher and also help us so that we can work together to have a better Nigeria in the years ahead.
“Our purpose through this programme is to share with you, our media partners, what we are doing and our plans for the future because you are important to us. I will tell you why the media is very important. We can always reach so many people if we were to go out in the streets to speak to everybody. We can always reach so many people within our ecosystem, within our immediate communities but if we want to achieve our purpose which is to unlock the power of good food to enhance the quality of life for everyone today, our generation to come, we need the media.
“Actually, we cannot talk about our health without talking about the environment. With global warming, we know that many of us are not able to sleep at night if there is a power outage. Global warming is creating that heat wind we are suffering now. Even right here in Africa you will notice that the weather has changed, you will notice that our gullies are blocked, you will notice that everywhere you turn, there is dirt, there are mosquitoes, there are flies, there are more rodents, more rats because we are not thinking about the whole ecosystem. We are thinking about how we can be more responsible in our waste disposal.
“If we, through this programme, are able to share in the mission, to share new practices, to tell what the implications are and what we are doing, and what other organizations could do, and you in turn help us to ensure that we are sending out information, enlightening our people, our communities and we all begin to work together with a changed mindset, changed behaviours, changed habit, then it will go a long way to enhancing and protecting our environment,” she added.
Victoria said talking about nutrition is to be deliberate about ensuring more nutrition security and food security and the need to practice regenerative agriculture, sustainable agriculture because of our rapidly increasing population.
She said the training programme is to make us know more about what creating shared value is; to know what health is and why health is important; to know how we can preserve health and the environment.
“We are here to share ideas with you and to learn from you also. By sharing ideas with you, we could actually discover what are the key things and we could share with you new research, new data that is available, new ways that we could think of enhancing the quality of life within our ecosystem – improving health outcomes for children, improving health outcomes for men, improving health outcomes for women; talking about iron fortification, all the micronutrients. There are a lot of things we know that we forget and this is the opportunity to remind us well,” Victoria explained.
She said, “So for us, this programme is not just a programme; it’s a part to an end and that end is how a community of people, how a nation of people, are well informed so that when they are making choices with their depreciating pocket sizes, are making the right choices – when it comes to what is nutrition; when it comes to what is nourishing and what will deliver the best value for my family.
