On Monday, the MTN Foundation stated that it has set aside no less than N1 billion for the remodeling of 40 Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) nationwide.
Disclosing this at the Foundation’s launch of “What Can We Do Together initiative” in Lagos, Executive Secretary of MTN Foundation, Odunayo Sanya, noted that even as the Foundation was working towards touching lives, it intended to create a playbook for corporate organisations to study.
Sanya said: “For us, it is beyond how much the Foundation is putting in. We are on a mission to create a playbook because we want more organisations to come into this space.
“It is difficult when there is no data as there will be nothing for them to go out with. As we do this to touch lives, our mission also is to create a playbook for other corporate organisations that would come in. We are doing 40 today; another organisation can decide to do 100.
“For us, we are calling on them to say that this is 40, it leaves us with 29,660 primary healthcare centres that would not be touched.”
She added that the Foundation launched the initiative to drive diversity and inclusion, saying it was important to carry everyone along because they wanted to meaningfully give back.
“What it means is that every year, we will unveil a set of programmes to Nigerians, so they nominate communities, which are further entrenching our belief that we are all heroes of change. For us, part of what we have done under project and we will continue to do is the installation of solar powered boreholes. It is solar powered because we also recognise that our environment is critical, we need to preserve the planet and the people and reduce the carbon footprint on planet earth. We have installed transformers across multiple communities in Nigeria and we have equipped lots of schools.”
Sanya explained that the initiative started in September 2015 and community-based projects have been successfully implemented in 586 communities across 530 local government areas under four phases.
Speaking on how the projects would be sustained, she said: “Sustainability is key through community involvement. You can go into a community and do a lot of things but if you don’t carry them along, you will come back and meet your project there. We go into the community to engage the community head, the head of women and youths, so they can take ownership.”
