Unilever For Pakistan is a movement that began during COVID as an effort to support the lives and livelihoods of the people of Pakistan. It has now evolved into an endeavour to improve the livelihoods of everyone associated with Unilever Pakistan’s value chain.
Our Living Wage Journey
All workers are entitled to a Living Wage. It ensures that workers can live with dignity and security. It empowers them to take care of themselves and their families and contributes to their overall well-being. Unilever Pakistan thus believes that a Living Wage is the cornerstone of a just and equitable society.
It is a measure of the minimum income that a worker must earn to meet their basic needs such as health, education, sustenance, and social security, which the current minimum wage system may not be able to provide for an essential standard of living. When workers earn a Living Wage, they are more productive, motivated, and committed to their jobs, leading to improved performance and a better working environment for all.
As of April 2023, 58% of our workforce is earning a Living Wage.
Guddi Baji Livelihoods Program
In 2012, Unilever Pakistan developed a partnership and consortium with a local social welfare organization, the Rural Support Program Network, to connect with the most vulnerable people in local communities. Through this platform, we have created an entrepreneurial movement whereby women in villages are given an opportunity to act as ambassadors and route-to-market agents for Unilever Pakistan, providing a means of income for them to support their families. This model incorporates recruitment, training and capability building via comprehensive training tools, focusing on techniques to run profitable businesses. This model was dubbed the Guddi Baji Livelihoods Program.
From its first ever salon model in 2012 to its retail operations from 2015 to 2018, to its partnerships with JazzCash and the Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN) in 2019, more than 8000 women have been trained and enabled as entrepreneurs.
The latest Guddi Baji iteration facilitated a partnership with Jazz, the largest telecommunications company in Pakistan. Both organisations leveraged their core competencies to increase the value of their products and drive financial inclusion for low-income women in Pakistan.
Read more: Unilever - Jazz Cash Guddi Baji Livelihoods Program | Unilever
Our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Journey
Equity, diversity, and inclusion are core values for Unilever Pakistan. We are committed to leveraging our footprint to create opportunities for inclusion within the direct and extended ecosystem that make up our business. We believe that our organization should reflect the social diversity found in our country.
Our efforts include ensuring equal gender representation within Unilever Pakistanas we aim for a 50/50 balance by 2030. Beyond women’s inclusion, we are also working on partnering with people with disabilities, and those in the transgender community to ensure that our reach extends to diverse talent from all walks of life.
Some of our initiatives for EDI are listed below:
Download our Diversity & Inclusion Journey (PDF 570.45 KB)
In 2022, we pivoted from our aim of being the top employer of choice in the country to becoming the most inclusive employer of choice. To this end, we doubled down on our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) efforts. We launched the UPLIFT Inclusion Trainee program whereby we hired 16 persons with disability and a transgender person on a trainee program intended to provide them with a level playing field to build their career.
Gender is another area of our core focus and to enable our women employees to succeed to senior leadership positions within the organization, we launched the #SheForShe program to provide mentorship to women by women leaders of Unilever Pakistan.
In a rapidly changing world, we also want to ensure that our people remain future-fit to adapt to the new ways of working with agility and mastery. We launched a Digital University for our employees which features learning modules and pathways to upskill and build capability on digital transformation.
Employee wellbeing remains our key focus especially in a post-pandemic, inflationary world and we offer our employees access to round-the-clock mental wellbeing resources through our trained Mental Health champions and our round-the-clock confidential Employee Assistance Program for counselling.
Employee safety is a non-negotiable for us and we continue to prioritize safety of our people and contractors from our offices, factories to on-the-job travel. With stringent safety protocols and regular safety advisories communicated across the value chain, we are constantly striving to keep our people safe.
