Poor hygiene leads to poor health
Fortunately, infant and child mortality rates have dropped in recent years, but they remain disturbingly high.
Lack of basic hygiene is often behind these premature deaths. Unilever Nigeria has therefore teamed up with the international children's agency UNICEF to raise awareness among school children about keeping clean.
Announced in October 2005, the three-year campaign will focus on teaching children about the importance of washing their hands with soap. Unilever is contributing Naira 78.6 million (around €500 000) to the initiative, including an immediate contribution of Naira 20.6 million to UNICEF.
The campaign set a target to improve hygiene practices in 222 schools across Nigeria, by the end of 2008. At the end of 2007, Unilever had donated over 5 000 bars of soap for use in handwashing presentations, and over 1 500 teachers had been trained to teach children about handwashing with soap. Water and sanitation facilities have been improved at 141 schools and work on the remaining schools continues.
A simultaneous campaign is strengthening local government capacity to monitor and evaluate hygiene practices.
"We are aware that gastro-intestinal disorders are passed on through a lack of proper handwashing, so the 'handwashing' campaign is the surest way of breaking the chain of such infections," said Hajia Amina Bala Zakari, the Federal Capital Territory's Secretary for Health and Human Services.
Communicating handwashing messages to children has a wider impact because they tell their families. We estimate the campaign has reached over two million people.
Improving the health of our consumers in Nigeria is one of the main features of our corporate responsibility programme. Since 2001, for example, we have donated over £75 000 (approximately €110 000); to international charity Water Aid to provide local communities with cleaner water facilities.
Another area is dental care. Over the last few years, we have funded free dental checks for around 10 000 people. Meanwhile, in 2006, we launched a '25 cent' toothbrush, the first of its kind in the world. This low-cost product enables people to brush their teeth thoroughly – in contrast to traditional methods whereby people clean their teeth by chewing sticks.
Health education
But prevention is the best cure of all. That means educating people, especially children, in healthy living. A good example is our work promoting nutrition and oral health. In 2005, we initiated a five-year campaign in collaboration with the Nigerian Association of Dental Students and the Nutrition Society of Nigeria.
The campaign aims to communicate the importance of a balanced diet and good dental care habits to primary school pupils and teachers. In the project's first six months, our outreach activities succeeded in reaching 300 000 pupils and 7 500 primary school teachers in the states of Cross Rivers, Ekiti and Gombe. Our target is to reach two million children and 50 000 teachers across Nigeria by 2008.
HIV/AIDS is another health risk that Unilever, together with other private and public sector organisations, has been working to combat. For more than half a decade, Unilever Nigeria worked with the UK Department for International Development on an ongoing project to protect at-risk groups from contracting the disease. We have also sponsored magazine programmes on radio and television, targeted at educating young people about HIV/AIDS. In 2006, our In Moments like This programme was aired on Nigerian Television Authority networks, reaching up to 30 million people.
We also seek to protect the health of our employees and have worked with the Liverpool Associates in Tropical Health to develop an HIV/AIDS workplace policy for all our sites in Nigeria. We have conducted staff surveys on attitudes to HIV which, according to estimates, affect more than four million Nigerians. At a practical level, we provide condoms and health services to our workforce.
