Lipton Yellow Label Gives Widows Reason To Smile
Campaign for the Lipton’s ‘Reason To Smile’, an initiative by Unilever Plc’s leading tea brand aimed at supporting 1,000 Nigerian widows with necessary care packs and seed fund to start a business, has just kicked off. Expected to be executed in states across Nigeria, the Lipton ‘Reasons to Smile’ campaign is also giving all concerned Nigerians the opportunity to get involved with one Lipton pack at a time, give widows a reason to smile and lighten their burden. In many Nigerian communities where a lot of women are housewives, fully dependent on their husbands, it becomes a great challenge when such families lose their breadwinner and find it difficult to cater for themselves and their children. These women need to be given a helping hand – a lifeline to create a better future for themselves and their communities in general.
Suffice it to say that becoming a widow in Nigeria is often followed by a fall into extreme poverty – a situation usually aggravated by widespread practice of property grabbing and sometimes, physical abuse. Consequently, they are subjected to food insecurity due to poverty or unemployment, failure to find basic and school necessities for their children, lack of shelter, difficulty in accessing working capital for small-scale businesses, and victimisation by harmful cultural practices.
In many traditional settings, the death of a husband can put women at the risk of social segregation and the loss of the security and social status their partners would have provided. They are immediately banished to the fringe of society and suffer different forms of stigma and discrimination. The challenges that widows in our communities and cities experience daily affects everyone. They are our mothers, sisters, friends, neighbours and more. They remain one of the most marginalised persons, a depressing reality that has dealt a blow to compassion and decorum in our society. The least we can do is to care for them and also provide them with opportunities for solutions – which is the objective of the Lipton brand.
For any nation or society interested in fostering progressive development, it is important that citizens create a social climate conducive for collective achievement. Apart from the need to adopt a friendly culture that dignifies victims and recognises their pain, widows need support systems that provide opportunities to reintegrate into society after the loss of their spouses. If we are going to achieve this, everyone needs to understand that widows are extremely disadvantaged. Widows need be celebrated and encouraged. They are an integral part of our society and deserve as much respect and dignity as anyone else. As women and mothers, they are active members of the Nigerian society who contribute to national development. We cannot allow them to be victimised and subjected to untold hardships just because they lost a loved one, Lipton is saying we have the power to lighten their burden and put smiles on their faces hence the ‘Reason To Smile’ campaign. For updates on Lipton ‘Reasons to Smile’ campaign, follow @LiptonNg on Twitter and LiptonNigeria on Facebook and Instagram. From Thursday May 24 to Saturday May 26 in Lagos, the maiden edition of the Excel Convention will hold at the Charis Event Centre, Ikeja. The convention which is the very first of its kind in Nigeria and Africa as a whole is being organised by an Evangelist from Kentucky, United States of America, Dr. Glenn Arekion, who is a constant visitor to Nigeria for 25 years now.
“I am looking forward to May 2018 when we will host our very first Excel Convention in the great Nigerian, city of Lagos. This is a dream becoming a reality. In 2017, I made my 105th trip in Nigeria and as you know I love going to this great nation and I have been going to Nigeria for 25 years. I know that I am called to Nigeria. I consider myself to be a missionary to Nigeria,” Arekion noted during a pressing briefing in Lagos to announce the forthcoming event.
Tagged, ‘Imparting the Supernatural in You’, the evangelist who said, “I am super excited about this year’s 1st Annual Convention in Lagos, Nigeria,” revealed that renowned preacher and author, Dr. Roberts Liardon, who is a reservoir of information on the keys to the supernatural in the lives of the great preachers of the past, will grace the occasion as special guest. Stressing in the significance of the theme for the convention, Glenn said, “I believe in the Supernatural and I have stated over and over again that, powerlessness is the blight of the modern church. Today we have eloquence and information but no power to bring about change in people’s lives,” he said.
On his choice to hold the ‘Excel Convention’ in Lagos, he said: “I am a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ from America, I have been here in Nigeria over 100 times preaching. But this is my first Excel convention in Nigeria that will be held in Lagos. Lagos is one of my favourite places in the world, I find the people very warm and receptive and on fire for God, to me Lagos is a perfect place.” Ayodeji Ake
QuickHelp device is Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled to provide services that make it unique which means it can provide you every information you need in an interactive way, it’s the first chat board to enable speech recognition, Chief Executive Officer, QuickHelp Nigeria, Mr. Tosin Odubela has said.
Briefing the journalists in Lagos, Odubela said QuickHelp device will ease the stress of searching the internet for information by providing in details data needed in swift mode and other personal request like; business tips, traffic information, airtime purchase and other relevant features.
“We thought of introducing something different from what is on ground and we generate ideas from the word ‘Quick’ and we developed QuickHelp which enables an instant feedback. QuickHelp is on web, facebook, twitter and android. Those are the platform we are on for now but we are currently working on improvement strategies to serve Nigeria and whole of Africa better. It covers every geographical area in Nigeria even though we can’t boast we have all the data yet. Right now we are not charging for our device because we launching out” Odubela said.
On security measure to prevent fraud activities on the device, Odubela said, “On QuickHelp, we have a very strong term of service to secure our clients and patronage. We are aware that some people may want to use QuickHelp as a contact of fraud activities which is why we have had a solid login to help on investigation should in case of any activity of such,” he said