Unilever Supports Sanitation

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Unilever Supports Sanitation

Unilever is Announcing a Commitment to Help 25 Million People Gain Improved Access to Toilets by 2020

This commitment is part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan - Unilever's blueprint for sustainable growth. It will contribute to our goal of helping one billion people improve their health and well being by 2020, and sit alongside existing goals on providing access to safe and affordable drinking water, and education on the importance of handwashing with soap.

An estimated 2.5 billion people - over one third of the world's population - live without access to adequate sanitation. Of these, over one billion continue to defecate in the open. This has a serious impact on people's health, nutrition, education, on gender equality and sustainable economic development. It is a global tragedy that a child dies of diseases related to poor sanitation every two minutes and it could be prevented.

"Business can and must be part of the solution in addressing global challenges that affect us all," said Unilever CEO, Paul Polman. "That's why we introduced the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan to positively contribute to the societies where we operate. With our portfolio of health and hygiene brands, our understanding of consumers' needs and our global reach, we are uniquely placed to help improve people's lives."

This target will be delivered by Unilever's toilet cleaning brand, Domestos and the Unilever Foundation, by scaling up existing partnership programmes.

To deliver this commitment, Domestos and the Unilever Foundation are working with UNICEF to change sanitation behaviours and empower communities to become free of open defecation. Domestos is also partnering with social enterprise eKutir, to deliver market-based models that enable entrepreneurs to set up local sanitation businesses in rural areas, and running school programmes with locally-based NGOs, which improve school facilities and educate the next generation of children on the importance of sanitation and hygiene.

So far, the partnership with UNICEF has already reached over one million people with sanitation behaviour change interventions, and this will result in these individuals living in open defecation-free communities.

Domestos is also working with other leading organisations including DFID, Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, WaterAid, Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), World Toilet Organization, Water and Sanitation Africa and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) with the mutual aim to bring even greater speed and scale to sanitation solutions.

Source: Unilever

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