Under the auspices of the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, and the President of France, François Hollande, the Nigerian company Dansa Foods Processing Limited (Dangote Group) and the French companies Nutriset and Onyx Développement (Nutriset Group) gathered in Abuja on May 14th, 2016 to officially launch a partnership in order to develop local nutritional solutions in Nigeria.
With a population of nearly 180 million people, Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa. However, every year, over 500.000 children under the age of five years old die from malnutrition. About 1.7million of Nigerian children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, and close to a third of the 10 million under 5-age children suffer from chronic malnutrition (FMOH, UNICEF & Nigeria National strategic plan, pg. 4).
To address this situation, DANSA and Nutriset Group are joining forces in order to bring local, efficient and sustainable nutritional solutions to Nigeria.
The signature of this Memorandum Of Understanding allows the two groups to create a joint venture to establish a production site of therapeutic foods and nutritional solutions in Nigeria, building on the expertise of Nutriset and sourcing as much as possible local raw ingredients (notably peanuts and palm oil), hence contributing to the growth of Nigerian agriculture and economy, also creating jobs for the Nigerian people.
In the long term, the joint venture is positioned to produce over 20,000 tons of nutritional products required by the humanitarian and private sector in Nigeria. This volume will be achieved in phases, with commencement of factory production by July 2017.
This effort will facilitate development of backward integration in groundnut value chain to achieve a zero - aflatoxin production by Nigerian farmers. This will contribute to empowerment of over 4,000 farming, families creating over 15,000 direct and indirect jobs.
The project Dansa-Nutriset aligns with the recent proclamation of the UN General Assembly to make 2016-2025 the “UN Decade of Action on Nutrition”, and connects with the initiative Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Business Network of which Nutriset is an active member.
The project directly responds to President Muhammadu Buhari’s vision to combat malnutrition, eliminate hunger and create jobs for the Nigerian people alongside of His Excellency’s other initiatives.
It also builds on French President F. Hollande active foreign policy to support sustainable economic development and nutritional autonomy of sub-Saharan countries.
This new joint venture will integrate the PlumpyField® network of local producers already present in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Madagascar, Niger, Sudan, and the United States of America- directly benefiting from the experience and synergies in place to serve the most vulnerable populations in partnership with the humanitarian community.
