P&G Beauty has joined Solvay’s Sustainable Guar Initiative (SGI) aimed at developing sustainable guar production at scale within the Bikaner desert district of Rajasthan, India.
The supplies Solvay with guar as a natural and renewable resource for Jaguar polymer ingredients used in hair and body care formulations.
The involvement of P&G Beauty will see the SGI programme will nearly double its reach in the region.
P&G Beauty’s partnership will add 5,250 new farmers to the programme, bringing the total reach of SGI to just over 11,000 famers.
This includes doubling the reach and scale of the programme with women, by training, supporting, and empowering 1,800 additional women as farmers, entrepreneurs, workers, and members of farming households.
In addition, P&G Beauty will enable the programme to double the number of women trained (nearly 900 in total) in the adoption of household hygienic practices as well as in the building of kitchen gardens, which will give women and their families the ability to improve their food security, household nutritional diversity and their livelihoods.
The P&G Beauty project will also include the construction of a new johad (a local community owned pond), designed to improve the capture and percolation of rainwater for home use, animal hydration as well as the establishment of a community plantation unit.
In all, it will significantly expand its efforts to equip guar farmers, especially women farmers, with the tools and knowledge in good agricultural practices that promote continuous improvement on key outcomes like higher-yield production and crop productivity, improved financial stability, and better living and working conditions.
“I am delighted to welcome P&G Beauty to the Sustainable Guar Initiative,” said Solvay chief executive Ilham Kadri.
“Through this fantastic partnership we will be able to significantly increase our impact and I’m particularly proud that together we will ramp up our efforts to empower farmers, especially women farmers. This is a win for farmers, customers and consumers,” he added.
