‘Whatever you need to succeed is right in you’

Hauwa Abbas is the image maker of Roots and Origin Foundation, a body set to ensure international acceptance for local commodities in the food industry. In this interview, she speaks on the need to give back to society by empowering the less privileged through the new initiative of raising $1 billion for charity. Why does […]

Hauwa Abbas is the image maker of Roots and Origin Foundation, a body set to ensure international acceptance for local commodities in the food industry. In this interview, she speaks on the need to give back to society by empowering the less privileged through the new initiative of raising $1 billion for charity.
Why does your organization seek to create a $ I billion fund?
We at the Roots and Origin are flagging off the foundation. What we are doing is creating funds. This is where the $ I billion challenge comes in. We hope to raise funds and create jobs at the community level through this programme. It’s a global initiative, a profit-making NGO in the sense that it is from our proceeds that we will give back to society. So whatever you buy, we take a certain percentage towards training and running empowerment programmes; helping to build and improve production of local commodities in the food industry, especially among those promoting healthy lifestyles through eating right.
Nigeria is lagging behind a bit with regards to the issue of local content. Take a look at Ghana and what they have been able to do with making their local agriculture products accepted by world standard. Ghana has many cooperatives; look at what they have done with shea butter. So we will be among those who will work with improving or making Nigeria products acceptable worldwide.  
What inspired your interest to venture into this project?
It’s all about giving and receiving. It’s about us loving ourselves. Life itself is a gift that we must make proper use of. For me, the first rule in life is giving and receiving. Yes, we have been told over the years that it is good to give, so much that many of us learned to give without little ability to receive. And when we say we want people to learn how to receive, we aren’t talking about money or material things only, we are talking about receiving help with skill acquisition. So the minute you understand the love from your source, which is you creator, you will also know that you can give out love too. We will not just train people, we will also make them realize that whatever you need to succeed is right in you. Some people might say that the greatest achievement of man are things like computers or travel to space. But if we think deeply, it is actually mankind understanding the importance of the mind. Most of the things we call great are ideas from the mind.
Apart from sales of your products, how do you intend to raise funds?
We will also be doing a lot of merchandising. If you look at it from the perspective that we already have good products, we can merchandise them at the global level. There are seven billion people in the world, imagine that we can use good merchandising to sell as much one billion times. We don’t have to wait for government to do this or that. We can be the one to bring about the change we want.
What are the challenges you envisage and how do you  intend to go around it?
This is a process that we started. We don’t plan that it would be an overnight success. We are in for the long haul and like you rightly noted, we have a good  business plan. What we are now concerned with is ensuring that our subconscious does not tell us we cannot succeed on this enterprise.
Talking about challenges, I know that we have a lot to do with regard to changing people’s mindsets from one of doubt to that of belief that we can succeed, that we all can be part of the success story we are trying to write in our NGO. 
How do you intend to handle issues like trade agreements and are there any such agreements which you intend to exploit to your advantage?
We are not going to be exporting just Nigerian goods. We will be marketing and merchandising brands so that way we will get into the global trade. We now live in a global village; people trade online. Today, you can buy something online in Australia and it is sent to you here in Nigeria. Yes, I understand your worry about how we are going to sell. We have plans for that. What I am more concerned about is how we can get the right people to be involved.
Are you saying you will be running something like a mall where many manufacturers will sell their products?
What we are saying is we will be doing more of merchandising. What we will be packaging are healthy food items that we eat here in Nigeria. We will be telling the world how they can eat right to remain healthy. What we are trying to defuse now is the negativity that most people in the world like to dwell on. We have set a one billion dollar target and we believe that we can achieve it.
Growing up as kids, we read a lot of inspirational books and we developed the right mindset which has helped us achieve our dreams and we believe that it will also help us do great things with this idea. We have an idea of a bucket list which we and our partners will look at from time to time, to see if we have achieved these things.
We can do a lot with marketing made in Nigeria products. The world is returning to natural things and we have hundreds of plants in Nigeria that the world will marvel at. We have plants that can prevent and treat diseases. There is so many things that God has blessed us with. But we want to use made in America and China products, rather than selling our own naturally given plants and food.