Unity Bank Plc and Lagos Food Bank have donated food products worth millions of Naira to Ogundimu Ilaje, a riverside community in a suburb of Lagos.
A total of 150 cartons of food with the label “Unity Box of Hope” were given out to hundreds of homes in the underprivileged neighborhood.
The act is a cooperative initiative to support and promote community-based programs that address hunger and malnutrition.
It is also a component of Unity Bank’s strategic Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSRs), which are intended to continue enhancing the social and physical well-being of the communities in which it operates.
The lender further stated in a statement that it backed the program since its objectives matched those of the Lagos Food Bank Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to offering humanitarian programs to the poor.
The donation comes as the nation’s economy continues to deteriorate, particularly in light of the skyrocketing food inflation—which, as of August 2022, was at 23.12%—which has helped many households from going hungry.
Speaking to the recipients at the site of the food distribution, Mr. Hillary Oguebo, Head of Corporate Resources at Unity Bank, said the bank was happy to donate the food items to the community to lessen the impact of the rising cost of food on them. He added that the bank, as an agric-focused financial institution, was fulfilling its core mandate in line with the bank’s drive for food security.
Unity Bank has a financing business model that is principally anchored, amongst others, on boosting agricultural production, and it is also useful for those who have not benefitted from the bank’s Agric financing package to receive direct food intervention as it is being done today. Due to a lot of factors, especially growing insecurity, food production has been impacted severely, leading to historical food inflation. That has left many households struggling and battling hunger. So, this is a thoughtful gesture that we hope to sustain to reach as many Nigerians who deserve this form of intervention at this critical period,” he stated.
Nigeria is ranked 103rd out of 116 countries on the Global Hunger Index with a score of 28.3, indicating a significant level of hunger there. This is a result of the nation’s rising food insecurity, which has increased from less than 20% to more than 80% since roughly three decades ago.
Unity Bank has a history of supporting smallholder farmers who increase food production through the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme. It has led some of the most significant and critical interventions in the agribusiness sector in Nigeria over the past six years (CBN).
The Bank is redefining CSR with strategic interventions that are precisely in line with its business strategy, such as a CSR effort that provides food to households in underprivileged neighborhoods.