Vehicle Company "VW and Ford" to Announce their Partnership Alliance to save Billions of Dollars

Volkswagen (VW) and Ford are expected to unveil an alliance on Tuesday that combines forces on commercial vehicles and is likely to expand into joint development of electric and self-driving technology, moves meant to save the car makers billions of dollars.

Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess announced a partnership with Ford on Monday. Picture: VOLKSWAGEN GROUP

Ford and Volkswagen will announce their partnership against the backdrop of the North American International Auto Show (Detroit Auto Show), Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess told reporters on Monday.

Nestle ends IAAF sponsorship deal amid doping crisis

Food and drink giant Nestle has ended its sponsorship of the IAAF, as it fears the doping scandal engulfing the world athletics governing body could damage its reputation.

The Swiss company said it had taken the decision with "immediate effect".

However, IAAF president Lord Coe said he was "angered" by the decision and would "not accept" it.

 

Last month, sportswear giant Adidas ended its sponsorship deal with the IAAF.

"We have decided to end our partnership with the IAAF Kids Athletics programme with immediate effect," Nestle said.

"This decision was taken in light of negative publicity associated with allegations of corruption and doping in sport made against the IAAF.

"We believe this could negatively impact our reputation and image and will therefore terminate our existing agreement with the IAAF, established in 2012.

"We have informed the IAAF of our decision and await a formal acknowledgment from them that our partnership has ended."

Big loss

Richardson Okechukwu, speaks needs for ‘Government, Private Sector Partnerships to Nigeria’s Agric Revolution’

Richardson Okechukwu, project coordinator for the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the British-American Tobacco Nigeria Foundation (BATNF) Cassava Project was at the Flag-off and Inputs Distribution Ceremony for Otu, Ogboro and Igboho which took place at Otu Community Hall, Itesiwaju LGA, Oyo State, last week. He speaks on the Cassava Project and the need for a sustained collaboration between the government and the private sector to drive the nation’s agriculture revolution, among other sundry issues. Excerpt:

 

How do you describe the partnership between IITA and BATNF so far

Well, it has been a very complementary. One, at IITA we are technical experts, we always interact with the farmers and we always hear their complaints about what they would love to do and what they would love to achieve. On major thing they always lack is the resources to get the inputs that they need to implement the technical knowledge that they have learnt from what we are teaching them.

This, for many years, has been affecting adoption; it’s been affecting seeing the new faces of the farmers that we have been talking about. You know, people don’t like farmers because of the way they look and all those kinds of things.

Then you wonder how come we do this thing every year they are still doing this business of farming. We have found out that the main problem is lack of resources to implement these technologies. So the BATN Foundation provided this great opportunity for 110 people to have these inputs that cover everything from land preparation, planting materials, technical resource persons to be in ground, herbicides and fertilizers to be provided for them.

So what remains is the actualisation of those findings and results that we have been telling them is possible. So it is no longer business as usual. The beautiful thing here is that the BATN Foundation has made it a grant; but it will turn out to be a revolving fund, that at the exit of the Foundation, the grant will still be there for this group of farmers to access, to plant and to be on their own. Also, there are some elements of sustainability which you cannot find in other relationships. But we have it found in this one.

So IITA is bringing on board its partners to make sure that every missing gap like marketing, forming of cooperatives, group dynamics, conflict resolution between crop farmers and livestock farmers and all those kinds of hiccups are all addressed; so that we can see how this model can be a good example for many other people to adopt.

So how long has this partnership on the distribution scheme been on