New Comic Book Saves Children By Teaching Hygiene
Unliver’s Lifebuoy soap brand is working to save children in the developing world with an innovative approach: comic books.
Tapping renowned comic book artist Craig Yoe to create it, Lifebuoy is working to distribute 20 million copies of the book this year. The comic book is just part of a program targeting young children in the developing world with puzzles, stories and games to teach them and their parents about the importance of handwashing.
Unilever reports that 1.7 million children will die this year as a result of easily preventable diseases, one-third of whom could be saved with handwashing.
Lifebuoy’s efforts since 2010 have reached 183 million people in 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 at 4:00 Eastern, Unilever’s Dr. Myriam Sidibe and Stacie June Shelton along with Craig Yoe will join me to discuss this remarkable program. Tune in then to watch the live interview.
You can download an audio podcast here or subscribe via iTunes.
Watch the short video mentioned in the interview here.
More about Lifebuoy:
As the world’s leading health soap, Lifebuoy aims to make a difference by creating accessible hygiene products (soap) and promoting healthy hygiene habits. With this in mind, Lifebuoy aims to change the hand washing behaviour of one billion people by 2020. Since 2010 Lifebuoy has taken hand washing behavior change programmes to 183 million people across 16 countries. For more information of Lifebuoy and its programmes, please visit www.lifebuoy.com.
More about Unilever:
Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Home and Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries. We work with 174,000 colleagues around the world and generated annual sales of €49.8 billion in 2013. Over half of our company’s footprint is in the faster growing developing and emerging markets (57% in 2013). Working to create a better future every day, we help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. Our ambition is to double the size of our business, whilst reducing our overall environmental footprint (including sourcing, consumer use and disposal) and increasing our positive social impact. We are committed to helping more than a billion people take action to improve their health and well-being, sourcing all our agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020, and decoupling our growth from our environmental impact. For more information about Unilever and its brands, please visit www.unilever.com.
More about Yoe Studios:
Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni’s Yoe Studio is an award-winning agency specializing in cool, youthful marketing and design. Our clients include Unilever, Microsoft, DC Comics, Marvel, Hasbro, Mattel, Mad magazine, MTV, Crayola and many others. Craig is a former Creative Director for the Muppets, Nickelodeon and Disney.
Myriam’s bio:
Dr. Myriam Sidibe is one of the world’s leading experts of brands that drive health outcomes through behavioural change. From within Unilever, she has created a movement to change the handwashing behaviours of one billion people, the single biggest hygiene behaviour change programme in the world, and conceived and established the UN recognised Global Handwashing Day – now celebrated in 53 countries.
Myriam’s approach to pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo has been pivotal to leading a paradigm shift in the way public-private partnerships for health are managed and funded. Her foresight in establishing Lifebuoy soaps co-branded school and neo-natal handwashing have proven so effective they have received over €20 million in support from external funders including CIFF (Children’s Investment Fund Foundation), DFID (Department for International Development), the Dutch Water Fund and USAID. They have also been replicated across Unilever as best practice examples for other brands looking to positively impact the world while driving market share.
As one of the world’s leading academics in the field of public health and behaviour change, Myriam represents Unilever with organisations such as Millennium Villages, the World Bank, PSI, WSUP, MCHIP and USAID to educate people about the importance of handwashing with soap, and create programmes that can help form healthy handwashing habits for life.
For the last 14 years, she has worked in more than 20 countries for NGOs (including the International Rescue Committee, Unicef and the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme) and the private sector arguing for a more transparent relationship between the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, advocating the need for businesses to gain growth and profits from engagement in social and health issues in order to build more sustainable, effective interventions, and is a regular commentator in the media on this.
Myriam has presented the results of her research and work at events ranging from the Water Engineering and Development Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Sanitation and hygiene education in conflict-affected areas: A Burundian case study) and the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Forum in Washington, USA (School Sanitation and Hygiene in Uganda: The challenges) to the Health Lions in Cannes, France (The Lifebuoy Story: How Simple Creative Thinking Has Been Saving Lives for 120 Years).
Myriam is one of the only people in the world with a doctorate in public health focused on handwashing with soap (completed in 2006 through the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). She also has a degree in environmental engineering from McGill University, Canada, a Masters in water and environmental management from Loughborough University, UK and combines her academic pedigree with a serious understanding of driving brands forward to create change and positively impact in the world.
Craig’s bio:
Craig is an author, editor, art director, graphic designer, cartoonist and comic’s historian who has worked with clients like MTV, Microsoft and Mad magazine. He’s best known for his Yoe Studio creative marketing solutions. Today he has a major emphasis creating Yoe Books (with IDW), and Books by Yoe (with various publishers) about the history of comics, cartoonists and pop culture. USA Today called Yoe “the Comic Book genre’s master archeologist!“, ABC TV hails him as “America’s foremost comics historian” and Vice magazine says he’s “the Indiana Jones of comics history!” Yoe has been an adjunct professor at Syracuse University and a popular speaker at conventions, conferences and colleges on creative marketing and on the history of comics. Yoe Studio is located in upstate New York, where Craig works and lives in an old stone castle on 4 wooded acres with his wife and business partner, the editor-designer Clizia Gussoni and their two children, a cat and way too many old mouldy comic books.
Stacie’s bio:
Stacie studied Public Health with an emphasis in Health Behavior, studying changing behaviors. Her work experience and expertise is around School & Adolescent health in both the US and Internationally for the past 14 years. For the Oregon state government Stacie was Co-Coordinator for “Healthy Kids, Learn Better” (HKLB) A Center’s for Disease Control (CDC) funded project integrating and implementing a coordinated school health model with Department of Health and Department of Education. Stacie has worked with 25 countries across Africa, Asia & Latin America while living in India, Nigeria and she currently resides in Nairobi, Kenya.
In 2011 Stacie joined forces with the Lifebuoy Team and the School of 5 superheroes with a focus on implementation across schools in Lifebuoy’s markets and a specific focus in 8 out of 10 of the countries with the largest number of children dying from diarrhea-related disease. She originally hails from Oklahoma in the USA & loves playing Ultimate Frisbee around the world in her free time!
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