z_Our involvement
Unilever's President of Foods, Home and Personal Care, Vindi Banga and WFP executive director James Morris signed a memorandum of understanding, which includes a joint action plan underpinning the partnership, on 21 December 2006.
Partnership agreed to combat child hunger
The pledge supports the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and to achieve universal primary education. Its overall objective is to improve the nutrition and health of poor school-aged children through WFP's school feeding programme. The first countries to benefit from this partnership will be Kenya, Indonesia, Ghana and Colombia.
Major challenge
With up to 400 million hungry children around the world, tackling child malnutrition is a major challenge. Now Unilever and the WFP have committed to work together to improve the nutrition and health of impoverished children through three major initiatives:
Our Family Goodness brand, which includes Blue Band and Rama, is bringing the partnership to life through cause-related marketing to raise awareness of child hunger, and funds for the WFP.
Fortified foods
We're also providing fortified products for hungry schoolchildren and helping the WFP develop a nutrition, hygiene and health education campaign to be rolled out across schools.
Unilever has also launched an employee programme called 'Together for Child Vitality'. This includes a global event, 'Fight Hunger: Walk the World' and local fundraising activities, as well as an employee exchange programme.
In addition, Unilever supports the WFP's School Feeding Programme with a corporate donation of 1.5 million euros over three years.
In 2007 Unilever donated EUR 1.4 million cash for food. This consisted of EUR 1.3 million for the WFP's School Feeding Programmes in the four chosen recipient countries, enough to provide nutritious school meals to 80,000 children for one school year. The remaining EUR 100k was put towards other WFP programmes.
Our plans for 2008 include:
Support WFP's school feeding programme in four countries: feed at least 100,000 school children for one school year.
Develop and pilot an educational campaign on nutrition, health and hygiene for 35,000 school children in Kenya and Indonesia.
Provide expertise and hands-on support to WFP Country Offices through the Employee Assignment Programme.
Engage countries in the Walk the World and other localfundraising activities.
