Hygiene & well-being

The issues

Every year over 3.5 million children die before the age of five because of diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections. One billion people lack safe drinking water. Most people, the world over, are affected by tooth decay and gum disease.

We are making a difference in all these areas – not just by providing products such as Lifebuoy soap, Signal/Pepsodent/Close Up toothpaste and Pureit household water purifiers, but by encouraging people to improve their everyday hygiene habits.

Our approach

• We make effective products that promote health and well-being – and, as in the case of Lifebuoy, have done for 100 years

• We transform people's everyday habits through effective behaviour change campaigns

• We work with partners, including governments, health agencies and non-profit groups, to achieve wider improvements in health and well-being.

Many of our brands, including Lifebuoy and Signal/Pepsodent/Close Up, have integrated health, hygiene and well-being into their mission and identity.

Our Global Health through Hygiene Programme works with our brands and partners such as the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UNICEF and the World Bank, to improve our technical capability in the area of health and hygiene, particularly in evaluating behaviour change.

Global Handwashing Day

Lifebuoy worked with NGOs, governments and other companies to co-found the first-ever Global Handwashing Day, launched on 15 October 2008 in 75 countries around the world. Lifebuoy teams co-ordinated a range of handwashing-related activities in 23 countries, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Ghana.

Swasthya Chetna

Lifebuoy's hygiene education programme, Swasthya Chetna (Health Awakening), has reached 120 million rural people in India over 2002 to 2008, and a further 13 million in other South Asian countries, also driving up soap sales.

Glowgerm

Lifebuoy’s 'glowgerm' demonstration shows that 'visibly clean' is not 'hygienically clean' by using ultra-violet light to show the dirt left behind on hands washed only with water.

Evaluating effectiveness

We have greatly advanced our ability to evaluate behaviour change through key partnerships and innovative measurement techniques .

Smart sensor technology

By placing a sensor inside a soap bar, researchers can unobtrusively measure how far awareness-raising initiatives really are boosting handwashing with soap within people’s homes.

Now widely regarded as the best way of measuring handwashing behaviour, the technology has already been used in partnership with the Gates Foundation and the World Bank in Bangladesh, and with UNICEF in Uganda.

Sharing our marketing skills

The In Safe Hands programme, developed by Lifebuoy and our Marketing Academy, teaches marketing skills to public sector health professionals to help them develop effective local handwashing and behaviour change campaigns. To date it has reached nearly 300 professionals in East Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Safe drinking water

In India we sell a unique water purifier, Pureit, that makes ‘safe as boiled’ water accessible to more consumers by not requiring electricity or pressurised tap water.

Meeting the toughest-possible regulatory criteria, Pureit has been proven to halve the incidence of diarrhoea as well as protecting against jaundice, typhoid and cholera.

Affordable at a unit cost of €32 and a running cost around half a euro cent per litre, the product has now reached a million households across all 20 Indian states.

Hindustan Unilever and UNICEF are working together on a project to bring safe drinking water to schools and day-care centres in low-income communities in South India.

Improving oral health

Tooth decay and gum disease are one of today's most common ailments, often causing low self-confidence too. Around the world, over 1 billion people do not brush their teeth with a fluoridated toothpaste at all, while over 2 billion do not brush twice a day. In developing countries, 90% of dental caries remain untreated.

Signal/Pepsodent/Close Up's mission is to improve oral health through school-based oral hygiene programmes. Every year these programmes reach more than 4 million children, and by extension their families, with a message to brush day and night using fluoride toothpaste. Impact is measured using the same smart-sensor technology we use to assess rates of handwashing with soap.

This mission is at the heart of our partnership with the FDI World Dental Federation which now covers 40 countries.

Unilever employees regularly contribute oral-health research to external journals, for instance, presenting papers on behaviour change at the FDI Annual World Dental Congress in Stockholm in 2008.