Continuing the success of the cooperation over the past 15 years in improving the health and hygiene conditions for the people, Unilever Vietnam (ULV) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) have just signed a strategic cooperation program “For a healthy and sustainable Vietnam” until 2028. The signing ceremony took place within the framework of the program “Meeting in response to National Hygiene Day to Improve People’s Health”.
Unilever and the Vietnam Health Environment Management Agency – VIHEMA (MOH) have just signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in implementing the program “For a healthy and sustainable Vietnam” in the next five years from 2023 to 2028, towards the goal of improving hygiene and health conditions for 15 million people nationwide.
First, the cooperation program is aimed at communication, education, raising awareness and creating personal hygiene habits – such as encouraging hand washing with soap, house and living environment sanitation and proper nutrition – for the community to prevent diseases and protect health.
The partnership is also an opportunity for Unilever and the MOH to jointly promote initiatives, innovative models and activities; as well as build up models of civilized and clean hospitals, health stations, residential areas to proactively prevent and manage epidemic risks, provide continuous and long-term health care, contributing to reducing the burden of diseases, fatality rates, and improving the quality of life for the people.
At the same time, Unilever will support the Ministry of Health to organize workshops to share knowledge and training for capacity building, forums and conferences to connect and dialogue among parties. This contributes to the development of a sustainable medical environment from the central to local levels.
For 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, Unilever along with their brands – namely Lifebuoy, Vim, P/S, Pureit and OMO – has cooperated with the MOH to implement several typical programs to help equip more than 22 million people with knowledge of personal hygiene habits such as washing hands with soap, cleaning the living environment, communicable disease prevention, such as “Washing hands with soap for a healthy Vietnam”, integrating environmental sanitation communication in the program “Expanding the scale of clean water and sanitation in rural areas”, communication for “Green Clean Beautiful Hospital”, the program “Stay Strong Vietnam” and the “5K”, “2K+” communications campaigns to prevent the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition to the cooperation signing ceremony with Unilever, the MOH, in collaboration with Ha Tinh Province and Unilever Foundation, also held “Meeting in response to the National Hygiene Day to improve people’s health in 2023 – For a healthy and sustainable Vietnam” in Ha Tinh City, Ha Tinh Province to mobilize all levels of government, mass organizations, socio-political organizations, families and the whole society to actively participate and closely coordinate in activities to implement the National Sanitation Movement to improve people’s health to contribute to disease prevention and control, and people’s health protection.
During the 10 years of implementation from 2012 to 2022, the Movement achieved many outstanding results in terms of well controlling the food poisoning situation to reduce the number of cases and deaths, doubling the rate of people maintaining the habit of washing hands with soap, increasing the proportion of rural households having hygienic latrines; increasing the clean water supply and the rate of clean water use at rural households, urban residents and health stations; ensuring medical waste to be treated at hospitals; improving school sanitation; especially improving personal hygiene and environmental sanitation to contribute to the control of the Covid-19 pandemic.
