Nestlé Vietnam receives two UN Women awards for advancing gender equality

Nestlé Vietnam has recently been honoured by UN Women with the Community and Industry Engagement Award and Gender-Inclusive Workplace Award

This is the first time Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Awards have been held in the Asia-Pacific region. The award recognises the efforts of companies with programmes and actions to create a corporate culture towards gender equality and women's empowerment, raise awareness, and attract more and more companies to apply WEPS in their businesses.

A representative of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) in Vietnam, Elisa Fernandez Saenz said: “The WEPs Awards offers business leaders and companies a unique opportunity to be recognised for their leadership to advance gender equality and make their efforts visible amongst their customers, employees, and partners, and inspire others to take action for wider impact.”

Binu Jacob, general director of Nestlé Vietnam, said, “Empowering women and gender equality is one of the top priorities of Nestlé. Since 2013, the Nestlé Group has signed a pledge to affirm their support for the WEPs with the UN Women and UN Global Compact. By 2018, Nestlé Vietnam also signed a specific commitment to support in Vietnam.”

“Not only do we make commitments on gender equality and women's empowerment but we also have made these commitments possible through the development of specific HR development policies and strategies. At the same time, to build an equal culture and environment based on the values ​​of respect for differences and the principles of women's empowerment at our company and across our value chain,” said Truong Bich Dao, HR director of Nestlé Vietnam.

One of the best examples of gender balance contribution and women's empowerment across the entire Nestlé value chain is the NESCAFÉ Plan project. This project has contributed to enhancing the role and status of women through training a team of female leaders of a group of coffee farmers. They are the bridge to convey the project's farming knowledge and experience to other farmers. The percentage of female farmer group leaders has so far reached 30 per cent of the total number of team leaders participating in the project.

In the working environment at Nestlé, the principles of gender equality are clearly shown in the activities of the company's HR development and empowerment strategy. The proportion of women holding senior management and leadership positions has surpassed the number of men by 50-55 per cent.