21 Days of Y'ello Care

The 21 days of MTN care that kicked off last year is a period where MTN Staff take time off their normal schedule to show care for our communities and share our tokens of love with the less privileged.
The programme was instituted to fortify and add a unique dimension to MTN's spirit of selfless service to the communities we operate in.

As a leading telecommunications company in Nigeria, we are committed to giving our customers world class telecommunications services. But beyond that, we are also committed to laying solid examples of social responsiveness and good corporate citizenship.
21 Days of Y'ello Care once again provided the platform to demonstrate MTN's leadership, this time in selflessness and social responsiveness. MTN staff optimised this opportunity.

As a matter of fact, Corporate Social Responsibility is an integral part of MTN's business strategy. Setting a novel precedent in CSR in the sector, MTN Nigeria in 2005 set up the MTN Foundation, with exclusive responsibility for implementing our CSR initiatives. The company has remained the only organisation that dedicates a percentage of earnings, annually, exclusively to corporate social investment (CSI) initiatives.

Focussing principally on the three important areas of education, health and economic empowerment, respectively, MTN Foundation has added real value to the lives of people across Nigeria. In the area of education, for instance, MTN Foundation, under a programme tagged SchoolsConnect, is providing hundreds of young people an opportunity to benefit from digital learning via digital laboratories which it has helped to establish in about 49 different secondary schools and two universities in 12 states of the nation and Abuja. More of these digital laboratories will be established in the future.

In the area of health, MTN Foundation is helping to curb the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Across the country, we are helping to provide succour for thousands of people living with HIV/AIDS as well as children orphaned by AIDS. So far, MTN Foundation has established six HIV/AIDS Voluntary Counselling and Testing centres in Lagos, Imo, Sokoto, Cross River, Gombe and Kogi states, respectively and deployed self instructional HIV and AIDS Touch Screens in various locations to help empower Nigerians, especially the youth with necessary information about HIV/AIDS.

Under its economic empowerment portfolio, MTN Foundation is empowering economically disadvantaged people via schemes like its Rural Telephone Project that provides sustainable means of livelihood for poor women and its model housing scheme which avails the poorer segments of the society an opportunity to own their own homes.

In the past 20 days, we have been able to build on the successes so far recorded by MTN's CSR programmes. We have demonstrated that beyond the company's consistent socio-economic contribution to the society, we are also individually committed to improving our communities and making lives better for those less privileged than we are.

In the past 20 days across Nigeria, MTN staff have gone out to nursery and primary schools, secondary schools and universities to mentor the students, inspire them and share knowledge with them. MTN staff have donned aprons and helped out in the kitchens of many old people's homes across the country, helping to prepare food and physically feed the invalid among the inmates. They have visited orphanages, prisons and similar places to share love and words of encouragement, as well as donated personal belongings and other tokens purchased from funds contributed among themselves.

MTN staff have shared their time and expertise with their colleagues in small and medium scale enterprises and taken part in cleaning exercises around market places. MTN staff with requisite skill have taken drivers through seminars in defensive driving and road safety, among very many other activities that Foyinsola Oyebola, the project coordinator and her team will shed more light on later.

Our business partners have also identified with this programme by taking part in some of the activities and contributing to the funds which we are today passing on to the less privileged in the society. Guaranty Trust Bank, Elizade Nigeria Limited, Ericsson, Standard Chartered Bank, Sports Writers Association of Nigeria (SWAN) and Huawei Nigeria. They all contributed teams to take part in the special 5-a-side tournament we put together on the 14th of June to raise funds for the less privileged. And by the way, the y'ello boys emerged champions.

The 21 Days of Y'ello Care project management team was led by Foyinsola Oyebola (Okundola Bamigboye, Fyneray Mbata, Rotimi Odusola, Olanike Kuku, Stephen Amuwa, Jude kelechi and Ify Kagho). They did a sterling job in the past few weeks.