Toilets. Everyone needs them, nobody wants to talk about them. ‘SDG6 is the furthest off-track and underfunded of all SDGs’ (Ann Thomas, UNICEF). Millions of toilets have been built to solve the sanitation crisis but 540m children still go to school without one. Why? Does nobody care? Or does something else, hidden from sight, hold us back? Domestos, working with experts and public-sector partners, discovered an urgent need for school toilet Operation & Maintenance (O&M) – an overlooked and underfunded issue yet essential to realising SDG 6 and SDG 4 (children’s right to quality education).

Domestos, an iconic toilet cleaning and germ-kill brand, has worked in sanitation for a decade, lending our branding and behaviour change expertise to this complex sector. Everything we make and do proves we are unstoppable in the fight against germs to keep people safe. So, when we uncover that millions of toilets are disappearing due to neglect, impacting millions of children and stalling efforts to reach SDG6 (specifically SDG6.2), we’ve got to act – it’s in our DNA. But it’s complicated. And it’s the sanitation community’s dirty secret; millions of dollars wasted building toilets no longer in use. The problem in schools is even worse because it impacts children’s ability to learn.

A bottle of bleach, however powerful, can’t do this alone. We need four times the pace of change to hit SDG6 but with time running out to reach the deadline, we needed to quickly galvanise the right stakeholders to see that if the first half of the SDGs was about building toilets, the second half must also be about maintaining them. Millions of toilets are still to be built in the run up to 2030 but with weak monitoring and data we make decisions in the dark and risk making the same mistakes. Meanwhile a generation of school children still impacted by the after-effects of the pandemic, are experiencing major funding cuts and crumbling infrastructure, which stop them thriving at school and causes them to fall behind.

Inflationary pressure had increased Domestos’ price so in a highly commoditised low engagement category we need to stand for something more than germ-kill – the ‘meaningful’ of brand power and equity. As Unilever’s leading toilet cleaning brand, building school toilets without a plan to clean and take care of them matters to us and our business.

But this isn’t an ordinary brand campaign, nor a one-off activation. Domestos has put itself at the heart of efforts to advance SDG6 by getting attention for, and making people care, about clean safe toilets - something easily taken for granted. 10 years ago, we led the UN ratification of World Toilet Day to get toilets on the agenda and have celebrated it every year since. In 2015, we co-founded – and still co-chair – the Toilet Board Coalition to accelerate private sector action towards SDG6. Our marketers annually spend 100 hours mentoring sanitation entrepreneurs. We have decade-long partnerships with NGOs, governments and academics on school toilet cleaning programmes in 8 countries, proven to work, reaching 59m people since 2014. We’re on track to reach 100m people with clean safe toilets by 2030, independently validated. But we know this isn’t enough compared to the size of the problem. Poor sanitation undermines the achievement of other SDGs so we won’t stop until Goal 6 and specifically 6.2 doesn’t need to exist.

Our purpose is to win the war against unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene. Everything we do proves we are unstoppable in the fight against germs, our brand essence. Our values and personality are guided by the Hero archetype: strong, uncompromising, unflinching - fighting battles others shy away from, such as the global sanitation crisis. James Bond would be proud. But this unstoppable brand ethos can be an uneasy marriage with the nuanced topic of sanitation. Nobody puts up with clumsy rhetoric. Unilever navigates a network of high-profile partners, so we needed to act sensitively, not criticising governments, panicking parents, or triggering ‘disgust’ showing dirty toilets.

BRIEF: Get policy-level stakeholders to realise that building toilets isn’t enough without O&M by engaging hearts and heads on the need for higher standards of school sanitation.

OBJECTIVE: Get people to realise that clean and safe school toilets are more valuable than they think.

O&M is the most unappealing of societal issues to tackle, the last thing considered by adults and the first to affect children. Politicians care about cutting the ribbon on new toilet blocks, not cleaning schedules. Such programmes are unseen, undesirable, never-ending, with no quick wins. Responsibility for constructing school toilets is different from maintaining them so securing funds is notoriously hard and hyper-local.

Yet cost-savings are significant: “Good maintenance can reduce the lifecycle cost of sanitation infrastructure by more than 50%’ (World Bank: Costs of Meeting the 2030 SDG Targets on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) as is the impact on a generation of children: “With clean and usable school toilets, students will be less likely to contract diseases, more likely to attend and remain in school, and more likely to achieve higher educational levels” (Josh Garn, University of Nevada School of Public Health)

Stop Toilet Loss because All Toilets Are Gold.

Most of us are lucky enough not to have to think about how valuable a clean and safe toilet is - because they’re well maintained. But this isn’t true for millions of children worldwide. Using the behavioural bias of “loss aversion” (a loss is more painful than a gain) we coined the phrase “Toilet Loss”. Then, to make the loss really matter, and because people take care of valuable things, we presented toilets not as mundane overlooked items; but in a way that embodies their real value to the world: as precious as gold. It takes a loss to truly appreciate something’s value. We created a bold icon – the gold toilet – that policymakers couldn’t ignore, and people wanted to share and show off, urging them all to Stop Toilet Loss - because All Toilets Are Gold.

Our starting point was that nobody cares. O&M is managed as a system, so our audience is complex and international: development banks, government ministries (finance, health, education), SDG data custodians, NGOs and in our key countries South Africa and the Philippines also citizens.

Exploiting the ‘loss aversion’ behavioural bias, we reframed O&M to show the value of keeping toilets clean and the loss when they’re not. Value and loss are invisible, so we made them tangible by showing (in gold) and quantifying (in numbers) a clean and safe school toilet helps children get sick less and go to school more.

We quantified the cost of not caring through an independent in-depth analysis by Economist Impact to prove ‘toilet loss’ is happening, at unimaginable scale. 1.2m toilets ‘lost’ in just 4 countries since 2015, amounting to US$1.9billion with additional economic and societal losses of US$10 billion. That’s a lot of gold.

We convened 80 partners and experts over 7 months through the editorial independence of Economist Impact to input, challenge our assumptions and align with our recommendation of no toilet built without a plan to maintain it.

We launched at gold-themed stakeholder debates in London, South Africa and the Philippines to mark World Toilet Day, raising the value of toilets in an unexpected way, convening representatives from SDG6 and SDG4, influencers, development banks and NGOs through the most unlikely of objects: a gold toilet. We activated employee volunteers to teach 6500 school children the value of a clean safe toilet and urged consumers and influencers to make their voices heard. Our gold toilet quickly became a new icon for the overlooked cause and 'Toilet Loss' a new economic modeling tool to spark investment, getting on the agenda at Africa and Asia Ministries meetings for the first time ever.

More attention for O&M than ever: globally 90m+ impressions, 3m citizens engaged, 80 stakeholders convened, 30+ PR articles, 21,400 visits to the ‘Tackling Toilet Loss’ report. In South Africa, Domestos increased sales volume during the campaign period, 1m children reached in 2023, increased private sector funding for the government-led programmes to reach 50% more schools in 2024. The Philippines government instantly adopted it as a decision-making tool: “Toilet Loss is a key piece of data we at the Department now use for planning and budget preparations to make universal access to sanitation for all school children a reality by 2030.” (Dr Dexter A.Galban, Department of Education, Philippines). And the concept was supported by SDG6 data custodians from WHO to UNICEF: ‘‘It’s very hard to get policymakers to care about school toilets. Toilet Loss is a powerful tool for attracting the investment needed to meet fast-approaching SDG targets” (Tom Slaymaker, UNICEF).

Due to resounding sector support, our proven economic model is scaling to 30 more countries, collating data at speed for the status and monitoring of toilet cleanliness, turning ‘Toilet Loss’ into a global indicator for the JMP report, SDG6.2 and post SDG agenda. We measure what we all value, essential for reaching collective goals.

Implications of this powerful data and economic modelling are huge. We could be 10% closer to usable toilets for all children if maintenance had supported construction. Data is precious but what we do with it matters more. We’re making Toilet Loss an open-sourced investment tool, for people on ground, in government conversations, to stop building toilets with no plan to maintain them. Gold toilets will pop up in unlikely places, like surprising SDG4 stakeholders at the Education World Forum and consumers at point of sale so toilets are treated like gold by everyone, not just Domestos.

All Toilets Are Gold captured the imagination of Unilever’s innovation teams to drive superiority and incremental growth alongside societal impact. A gold bottle is in development, launching this year, to raise attention and funds with an NGO. Our gold toilet installations made our annual employee volunteering one of Unilever’s biggest so we’re set to double our school outreach in 2024.

“The transformative power of Toilet Loss is a new way of understanding the value of O&M of school toilets, guiding much-needed investments” (Dr Habib Benzian, WHO Collaborating Center)

“A real breakthrough, finally bringing to the table facts and figures to support a completely different approach to the sanitation crisis” (Bella Monze, German Development Cooperation)

“Highlights the importance of well-maintained toilets for children to thrive. As important as textbooks and for the first time valued as such!” (Beth Dunk, Save the Children)

“A seminal piece of work” (Claudio Deola, Relief International)