Cover story
‘Dangote Intervenes In Crisis Caused By Natural Disasters’
Youssoufou
because if the idea isn’t there we keep on going to Alhaji Dangote to request for money. This is not supposed to be because an endowment is meant to be invested so as to make more money that will make things work. How would you sustain the empowerment programme among women? The women actually know it is a one-off thing. This is what Alhaji Aliko Dangote wanted to do. Some of the new things that we are thinking of are what if we help them start a business in a practical way. For example, a woman who sells Akara by the road side needs a sustained way to get the beans. She needs a new stove, a supplier of oil. When she has all that she can actually sustain herself. You will be surprised how much money she will be making from the small activities. Honestly, it is really amazing to know that people can actually make a lot of money from these small activities to which we don’t pay attention. Like the ones selling peanuts, selling oil
and groundnuts. They all make a living from it. They are able to send their kids to school from the money they make. They can also afford to go to the clinic when they fall ill. People are actually able to sustain themselves by doing activities like that. We are just thinking about going around the whole country and giving almost a million women these ideas. Then what do we do after that? We have a plan in place to understand the impact of these gifts. So far, it has been amazing seeing what the women have been doing with it. It is a blessing that just came to them. The women, from these routes since we started giving out the phones and giving
Everybody is coming together to ensure that what needs to be done is done within the malnutrition space out the money, have a mobile payment platform where they don’t have to take out all the money at the same time. They can take out a thousand naira a time with which they can manage themselves. They have had very different result from the first ones that we did where we gave them the cash in an envelope. The cash in an envelope gets lost or sometimes their husbands can take it away. Other time someone can steal it on the
way or someone deceives them by saying they are the ones who put their name on the list so you have to give me my share. All kinds of things actually led to the ineffectiveness of the programme initially. As we grow, we are trying our best to make the system effective. Doing it has a mobile payment already. You know it is the women that you sent the money and phone to that is actually getting it. Except she willingly gives her phone to somebody then you know that it really her choice. Your involvement in Nepal? Those kinds of gifts are just a gift. Alhaji Dangote was just really moved by what he couldn’t believe that people in Nepal are actually really poor and we were the only non-western organization that came to their aid because nobody in Africa or in northern America will say let us go help our brothers and sisters. It is just so far from us. But if we are the ones in difficulty other people come to us. Alhaji was like know we need to go and help these people because they’re really struggling. We just gave the money to the Prime Minister of that country they used it as part of reconstruction funds. It wasn’t like something we can actually measure by asking what they did with the money. It was like when we gave money to Tunisia when they had meningitis outbreak and they were out of vaccines. They had no money to buy the vaccines. So we quickly sent them some money to buy the vaccines so they were able to immunize the Continues on P40
BRAND VISIBILITY •DECEMBER 2017
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