As part of our Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever has made a commitment to helping more than one billion people take action to improve their health and wellbeing by 2020.
Delivering on this commitment won't be easy. At Unilever, we believe that public/private partnerships are critical to creating the type of transformational change needed to tackle threats to the future health and wellbeing of people in need and achieve our sustainability goals.
An estimated 2.5 billion people - over half of the developing world's population - do not have access to improved sanitation. Of these, 1.1 billion people have no sanitation facilities at all, and practise open defecation, which poses the greatest threat to human health.
Children are particularly vulnerable: poor sanitation is a leading cause of diarrhoea, which results in at least 1.1 million deaths of children under five annually. In the developing world, one child dies of diarrhoea every 20 seconds; a statistic that I personally find appalling.
The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7c is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the global population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Unilever has been actively addressing the lack of access to safe drinking water, and delivering against our goal of making safe drinking water available and affordable to 500 million people. The recent launch of Waterworks, a non-profit initiative that will provide safe drinking water to those most in need, serves as an example of our commitment.
But sanitation is an area that has been largely neglected by most companies, NGOs and governments. At the current rate, the sanitation MDG target will not be met until 2026. Open defecation remains a very real problem that needs to be addressed more decisively if we want to safeguard the future of children around the world.
Raising awareness of the sanitation crisis is particularly relevant this week as South Sudan – a country in which access to sanitation is estimated to be below 10% in some areas – celebrates its first anniversary as a country.
The Unilever Foundation and Domestos, our toilet hygiene brand, have joined forces with UNICEF to help improve access to basic sanitation by supporting UNICEF's Community Approaches to Total Sanitation (CATS) programme. We will contribute to changing the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people through sanitation programmes that promote good hygiene practices, help create demand for toilets and raise awareness for the sanitation crisis. In the first year, the programmes we are supporting will help 400,000 people to start living in open defecation free communities in nine countries across Africa and Asia – including South Sudan.
Together with our partners, we will deliver life-saving solutions that help improve the quality of people's lives, and in turn, drive significant and scalable social change. Unless we do so, the children of South Sudan, and of other countries around the world, will not be able to build a future for their countries.
Keith Weed is chief marketing and communications officer at Unilever