Every year, a staggering 2 million children under the age of 5 die of infections like diarrhoea and pneumonia. These deaths can be prevented by the simple act of washing hands with soap. Unilever’s Lifebuoy soap has launched ‘Help A Child Reach 5’. An initiative aimed at mobilizing momentum to change hand-washing habits of a billion people by 2015.

To make a real positive impact, we’ve adopted Thesgora, a village with one of the highest diarrhoeal rates in India and committed to ensuring every child gets to celebrate their 5th birthday.

In order to give the statistics a human face, we kick-started the initiative with an emotional story of how washing hands with soap can save a child’s life.

‘Help A Child Reach 5’ is not about selling Lifebuoy soap as a product, but about sharing the brand’s 100 year old social mission of saving lives. Inspired by real life parents, ours is a story of a father so overcome with joy the first time a child of his survives the age of 5, he decides to walk on his hands to seek God’s blessing. This is not just a one-off video, but the start of a long-term initiative aimed at ridding the world of preventable child deaths.

People across the world, from all walks of life have been moved to tears on viewing the film. In just over a month the film on YouTube has garnered 6 million views.

We have taught 130 million people across the world healthy hand washing habits. 7.74 million kids across 9,285 schools and 4.76 million parents from 46 countries pledged to wash hands with soap.

We have started conversations around an issue that no one knew about with newspapers like Times of India now writing articles about diarrhoea and its prevention. 2.7 million tweets and 1,910 blogposts spread our message.