Nestlé in society Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015

Nestlé in society:
Creating Shared Value
Nutrition, health
and wellness
Rural development
Water
Environmental
sustainability
Human rights
and compliance
Our
people
G4-EC7, Procurement practices G4-DMA, FP2, Supplier environmental assessment G4-DMA, G4-EN33, Supplier assessment for labor practices G4-DMA,
G4-LA15, G4-HR5, G4-HR10, G4-SO9, G4-SO10
Empowering women in
Côte d’Ivoire
To better understand the role women play in the cocoa supply
chain, the risks and obstacles they face and their potential role
in improving labour conditions, we asked the FLA to generate a
specific gender report when assessing working conditions in
our cocoa supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire.
To analyse women’s roles more specifically, the FLA team
conducted an additional 370 interviews, including individual
interviews with 244 rural women in cocoa-producing
communities. The resulting report assesses the roles of
women, describes the unique risks they face and makes
recommendations on how to improve their conditions,
covering: the encouragement of equal opportunities among
co-operative members; registering cocoa farms under both a
producer’s name and that of his wife; ensuring women can
purchase cocoa seedlings and access personal protective
equipment; making training sessions more welcoming for
women; and establishing ways for women to redress
grievances.
These recommendations were used to update Nestlé’s
Action Plan on Women in the Cocoa Supply Chain. This action
plan outlines our vision to empower women for better
livelihoods and to eliminate child labour (see Human rights and
compliance) in Nestlé’s supply chain. An update detailing the
progress made between August 2014 and January 2015 has
since been published. We understand that there are no easy
answers, that this will be a learning process and that all
stakeholders need to play their part. Nonetheless, we have
committed to act in three key ways:
• Promoting gender awareness: working with our suppliers,
we have organised training on gender issues for cooperatives
in the Nestlé Cocoa Plan in Côte d’Ivoire and our
suppliers’ field staff. The aim of the training sessions – first
held at our demonstration farm at Zambakro – is to
challenge people’s perceptions, explore ways to help them
overcome barriers, set up action plans and open up roles to
women, such as lead farmers, nursery managers, cooperative
managers and community officers. We held
training sessions with members of 25 co-operatives in 2015,
with each session resulting in an action plan; we aim to
cover a further 25 co-operatives in 2016 and all cooperatives
by 2017. We also encourage co-operatives to
select women to lead Nestlé nurseries growing cocoa
plantlets. Of our 37 nurseries, 27% are now led by women
– up from 23% in the previous season.
• Giving women a voice: we commissioned the FLA to work
with two women’s associations in 2015, to create a point of
contact and a platform through which women can engage
with each other, local authorities and Nestlé. The
opportunity for dialogue could be used to voice their
concerns and explore issues, such as personal protective
equipment for women; grievance, counselling and support
services; literacy; and access to credit. We aim to extend
this further.
• Helping increase their income: we encourage the
distribution of cocoa plantlets to women, and access to
training. We also help them to produce other food crops, for
both household consumption and sale, initially focusing on
cassava with one of our suppliers, Olam. High-yielding
cassava varieties will be made available to more than 2000
women by 2016 and two cassava nurseries have been
established; we will track incomes over time. Incomegenerating
activities aimed at women in all our cooperatives
are supported by a specialist recruited by the
International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), as well as staff from
ANADER, Côte d’Ivoire’s national rural development agency.
In 2015, we rolled out similar income-generating activities
to 321 women across 16 co-operatives. Our crop
diversification programme has been accepted for inclusion
in the Cocoa Livelihoods Program, the World Cocoa
Foundation-led initiative that aims to double the income of
approximately 200 000 smallholder cocoa-farming
households in Central and West Africa.
To build on the successful activities to date, as well as
delivering these activities to more co-operatives and farmers,
we aim to trial expanding farmer training to all workers,
including women. We also aim to incorporate gender and child
labour awareness training in standard farmer field schools.
Read more in the Human rights and compliance chapter.
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