IRC helps to keep soap opera grounded in reality of kids’ lives

IRC has been helping one of the world’s giant soap companies understand the reality of kids in developing countries – especially in relation to school sanitation and hygiene education.

Unilever – manufacturers of Lifebuoy, Dove, Lux and other soaps – invited IRC to add its expertise on school sanitation and hygiene education to a Lifebuoy & Kids Day, in London, and to guide participants in understanding young people’s realities in developing countries. Unilever aims to create a body of learning to share across the company, to fuel the work Lifebuoy and its partners are doing to reduce child morbidity and mortality in the developing world.

Lifebuoy – the number one market share soap in India and in many other countries – is working with UNICEF, the Global Public Private Partnerships for Handwashing and with other partners to make handwashing with soap an everyday reality in Asia and Africa.

On 6 December 2006, experts from the public and private sectors shared insights and strategies on communicating with children aged 5-14. This expertise will be a key input in developing interventions aimed at changing children’s handwashing behaviour. While the focus is on Lifebuoy and its partners, tools developed will be applicable to any brand or agency wishing to optimise communication with children.

Four areas

Participants focused on four areas in the discussion how to get children to hand wash with soap:

1. Kids development. What are the fundamental stages children go through from a cognitive, social, physical and emotional perspective?

2. Enduring emotional drivers. What are the fundamental and unchanging drivers that motivate kids as they move through life toward adulthood? Bravery, Morality, Belonging, Up-ageing (wanting to be older) and Mastery (wanting to do things yourself).

3. Understanding children. Understanding children requires a different approach. How do you step into their lives and understand how they see the world, rather than viewing things from an adult perspective?

4. Case studies. What could Unilever take from success stories inside and outside their business to translate into successful approaches to shifting children’s hygiene behaviour?

Unilever has launched large scale hygiene education/handwashing campaigns and developed a communication training programme for policy makers for national handwashing campaigns in South Asia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Unilever also provides technical support and marketing expertise to PPP projects in Ghana, Nepal, Peru, Senegal, and Madagascar. In Uganda, they work with the Discovery Channel, the Girl Education Project (GEP), and UNICEF to reach schoolchildren.

Lifebuoy says its approach is not philanthropy, but a marketing programme with social benefits. In India, for example, where Lifebuoy developed the rural health and hygiene education programme, Swasthya Chetna (Health Awakening), the company says: “For Unilever to build its business in India over the long term …it must attract new consumers, including the estimated 70 million people who never use soap.”

What Lifebuoy knows about Kids will be posted on a new website due to be launched in the first quarter of 2007.

Keywords

• Information and communication
• Sanitation - School sanitation