Equity, diversity and inclusion
Sunlight – Women of More Program
Sunlight has partnered with Absa Bank and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to train 10,000 Kenyan women in business on financial literacy & business management in the first year.
Sunlight is committed to helping over 100,000 Kenyan women entrepreneurs to develop their businesses into sustainable and profitable ventures they can be proud of by 2026 through the ‘Sunlight Women of More’ program. This will be done by providing tools and partnership to allow women to become more, through various initiatives such as financial literacy training and advertising support.
Supplier Diversity Program
Early 2021, Unilever announced a wide-ranging set of commitments and actions to help build a more equitable and inclusive society by raising living standards across its value chain, creating opportunities through inclusivity, and preparing people for the future of work.
Unilever Kenya thereafter blazed the trail with a raft of projects top among them being the “Supplier Diversity Program”. This is a partnership program between Unilever Kenya and a not-for-profit organization working to create thriving economies in Africa, Invest in Africa (IIA) to accelerate trade for marginalized Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya by enhancing their access to procurement opportunities.
The collaboration enables capacity building to augment the ability of the SMEs to access tender opportunities availed through the partnership. Specified target groups include SMES being run by youth and women, those in informal settlements, cultural minority groups, and persons living with disabilities.
Jaza Duka Program
In 2018 Unilever East Africa, KCB Bank Kenya, and Mastercard rolled-out a program aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses across Kenya (bottom of the pyramid) to overcome the cash constraints that limit their ability to buy and sell more Unilever products, thereby enabling them to grow their businesses.
‘Jaza Duka’, which is Swahili for ‘fill the kiosks,’ combines distribution data from Unilever and analysis by KCB Bank, on how much inventory a store has bought from Unilever over time. The results from the analysis are used to provide a micro-credit eligibility recommendation by KCB.
Once the micro-credit line from KCB is approved, the store owner can increase their purchases of product from what they can buy with cash on hand to what they can sell. The credit line from KCB is provided through a secure Mastercard digital payment solution.
To date, over 12,000 stores have been onboarded across the country with a potential reach of 60,000.