Royal FrieslandCampina will invest €23 million in an evaporated milk and ready-to-drink milk factory in Nigeria as part of the company’s Dairy Development Programme (DDP).
The announcement was made during a visit to Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, by the Dutch cooperative’s CEO Hein Schumacher. While in Nigeria, Schumacher – who took over from Roelof Joosten as CEO last year – met the country’s vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo.
Ben Langat, managing director of FrieslandCampina’s Nigerian business, told the country’s Leadership newspaper: “Four model farms with crossbreed cows have been established to improve local milk collection across its five milk collection centres.
“Our company is fully committed to working with local farmers to grow local milk production and ultimately ensure that Nigerians continue to benefit from the nutritious content of milk.
“Working with 3,500 dairy farmers in over 90 farming communities in Oyo State, we are already providing the required knowledge transfer and sustainable livelihoods for communities. We plan to transform an additional 500 pastoralists to settled dairy farmers under the DDP model. Already over 100,000 people have been positively impacted around these communities.”
The Dairy Development Programme is FrieslandCampina’s initiative for sharing knowledge and training with farmers in a way that improves the farming infrastructure for everybody.
Its main activities take place in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia. China, Russia, Romania Nigeria and Pakistan. Areas of focus include improving the quality of milk, increasing productivity per cow, and securing access to market.
Since the start of the programme in the 1980s, the Dutch dairy cooperative estimates that it has directly or indirectly reached more than a quarter of a million dairy farmers.
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