Millennium Development Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

Our contribution

More on our contribution

Our partnership with UNICEF, launched in 2004, aims to develop hygiene education and awareness initiatives for children, thus contributing to the reduction in childhood mortality. Along with UNICEF and non-profit organisation Synergos we have formed the Partnership for Child Nutrition in India. We are also working with the UN World Food Programme in a three-year partnership, Together for Child Vitality, aiming to improve the health and nutrition of school children in developing countries.

We continue to work with Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), a partnership of public and private sector organisations, to look at water, sanitation and hygiene issues in poor urban areas, particularly slums in developing and emerging countries. We have designed an approach to test whether improved water and sanitation conditions delivered in conjunction with a hygiene behaviour programme are better than infrastructure improvements alone.

In developing countries infectious diseases are still the greatest threat to public health. Diarrhoeal diseases alone are responsible for the deaths of at least 2 million children annually and hygiene is of primary importance in resolving this problem. Despite major advances in understanding of public health, too many people still suffer life-threatening diseases – even though simple changes in behaviour can save lives, such as washing hands with soap at the right time and in the right way. Lack of awareness and affordability of products remain barriers to progress, while millions still lack access to clean water and basic sanitation.

We have put in place our Global Health through Hygiene Programme to co-ordinate and enhance the impact of our many hygiene initiatives around the world.

One example is our Lifebuoy Swasthya Chetna (Health Awakening) programme in rural communities in India. We are working in partnership with parents, health educators, teachers, community leaders and government agencies to deliver the biggest health education initiative ever undertaken in the country. Swasthya Chetna aims to educate people in rural India about basic hygiene habits, including washing hands with soap.

The campaign started in 2002 in the eight Indian states where deaths from diarrhoeal diseases were highest and soap sales the lowest. So far the programme has reached 120 million people in 51 000 villages. Similar programmes in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia have so far reached a further 13 million people since 2002.

Working with UNICEF and local and national government in Uganda, we set out to ascertain whether school children could act as agents of change within their families to promote handwashing with soap. Using a smart sensor soap to monitor behaviour, results of the study were very positive. Families whose children had been through the awareness programme increased their use of soap by almost a third compared with families of children who had not.

In Bangladesh in 2008, we carried out a study using this smart sensor technology, with funding from the Gates Foundation, as part of our involvement with the World Bank's Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap.

Our Pureit in-home purifier provides water that is free from harmful germs, protecting against waterborne diseases like diarrhoea, jaundice, typhoid and cholera. The purifier costs €32 and has a running cost of around half a euro cent per litre, making it a much more affordable alternative to boiling water or using bottled water. During 2008, Pureit was rolled out to 23 states in India, and reached all 28 states by early 2009.  It is now bringing safe drinking water to more than 5 million people in a million households.

UNICEF and Hindustan Unilever are working together in a project in Southern India to use Pureit to provide safe drinking water in schools and day-care centres in low-income communities.