Background

In 2024, 3.4 billion people – two in five – still lacked access to safely managed sanitation, including 354 million people practicing open defecation.^*1 The human cost is devastating – over 1,000 children under five die each day from diseases^*2 that are spread by unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene.^*3 Globally, about 1.7 billion people – one in five – do not have basic hygiene services at home. Among them, 611 million people still have no handwashing facility at all, and another 1 billion have only limited service, lacking soap and/or water, increasing the risk of rampant infectious diseases.^*1

The absence of safe toilets and handwashing facilities is a crisis that stifles opportunities for growth and development across entire regions. It also leaves people – women and girls, in particular – exposed to the danger of animal attacks and sexual assault when seeking private places to defecate. In schools, the lack of proper toilets and privacy also exacerbates the educational gender gap, as menstruating girls are often forced to miss classes.

Access to safe water and toilets, along with improved hygiene practices among all people, could generate an economic recovery worth trillions of dollars for developing countries over the next 20 years.^*4 To meet this potential, a 2025 WHO and UNICEF report called for a six-fold acceleration in progress on sanitation toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 6.2 – achieving access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and to end open defecation by 2030.

LIXIL contributes to achieving these global goals by developing and offering affordable, widely accessible products and continuously collaborating with governments, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and various other stakeholders to tackle sanitation and hygiene challenges at scale.

*1 “Progress on household drinking water, sanitation and hygiene 2000-2024: special focus on inequalities” by UNICEF and WHO's Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (Opens new window) >

*2 Diseases spread by unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene include diarrhoeal disease, cholera, dysentery, shigellosis, typhoid, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis, acute respiratory infection (ARI), protein energy malnutrition, and soil transmitted helminths.

*3 “Triple Threat 2023” by UNICEF (Opens new window) >

*4 “Mission-critical: Invest in water, sanitation and hygiene for a healthy and green economic recovery” by WaterAid (Opens new window) >

Our Strategy

Global sanitation and hygiene is one of LIXIL’s three strategic pillars, addressing urgent global issues in line with our purpose to “make better homes a reality for everyone, everywhere.” We have set ourselves the target of improving the lives of 100 million people around the world by 2025 through improved sanitation and hygiene. And we are committed to achieving this by providing access to innovative and affordable sanitation and handwashing solutions.

SATO is dedicated to empowering people everywhere so they can have a better life and enjoy a brighter future, through innovative sanitation and hygiene solutions. SATO’s affordable solutions are complemented by LIXIL’s other value-added products, which not only support to improve the quality of life over time but also create market demand for customers at different life stages who stand to benefit from the wider LIXIL portfolio of products and services.

SATO’s innovative sanitation and hygiene solutions are increasingly being used worldwide, earning wide praise. However, we work to look beyond product innovation to further extend the impact of our product solutions. SATO strives to establish local sanitation and hygiene markets and expand the economic impact of our product offerings. We are adopting a more engagement-focused approach, rather than simply training local masons for installing SATO products. Working with our partners, we provide opportunities for the masons and entrepreneurs to learn how they grow their business and their local economy under our Make-Sell-Use business model. We also pursue a variety of outreach methods for raising awareness of sanitation and hygiene as well as the impact it has on households and communities among people in rural and peri-urban areas with the most urgent needs. In addition, LIXIL actively promotes these initiatives in partnership with diverse stakeholder groups to ensure as large and wide-reaching impact as possible in those communities. We take pride in our continuous global partnership with UNICEF and our alliance with FINISH Mondial, which provides financial services to facilitate sanitation and hygiene improvements. Additionally, our collaborations with various NGOs, local manufacturers, and retailers are invaluable. These partnerships bolster the reach of our SATO products and enable creating innovative partnership platforms and business models, paving the way for more integrated solutions. We are convinced that these collective efforts amplify the contribution and impact of the private sector in addressing sanitation, hygiene challenges, and the broader social issues they bring.

Learn more about Innovative and Affordable Sanitation Solutions >
Learn more about Impact through Partnership >

Governance Structure

The Global Sanitation & Hygiene Council* oversees the strategic approaches and initiatives, convening quarterly in principle, to assess progress and explore potential measures in line with our Impact Strategy. Progress updates on initiatives that fall under the strategic pillar of global sanitation and hygiene are reported to the Board of Executive Officers on a quarterly basis through the Impact Strategy Committee. Furthermore, these updates are presented to the Board of Directors biannually for thorough discussion and oversight.

Additionally, we host quarterly taskforce meetings where regional external affairs leaders convene to discuss public policy trends, social issues, and local initiatives. These meetings are a platform for sharing experiences and insights, ensuring our strategies remain timely and effective.

Governance Structure

As of April 2025

Targets and Progress

LIXIL has set an ambitious target to improve the lives of 100 million people around the world by 2025 through providing access to improved sanitation and hygiene. We aim to achieve this through providing access to a range of innovative and affordable toilet and handwashing solutions. As of the end of FYE2025, our products have provided improved sanitation and hygiene access to approximately 82 million people. While reaching our 100 million target is a significant milestone, it is one step in our ongoing journey. We remain committed to accelerating our efforts to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 6.2, which aims to ensure access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all by the year 2030.

*An additional approx. 14 million people were accounted for in FYE2025 in household and community settings: 13.2 million with improved sanitation, 0.8 million with improved hand hygiene, as a result of SATO products shipped in FYE2025 and in updates to use cases based on partner reporting. Our approach to community and/or public toilets initially described in “Global Sanitation & Hygiene: LIXIL’s Impact Methodology” (June 25, 2024) was expanded to transparently account for time-bound (>30 days), high-use public toilets. In these use cases such as large religious gatherings and/or disaster responses, these public facilities are often one of the only sources of improved sanitation and hygiene services. To transparently account for each unique situation, partner-reported data is included in the impact estimates, and is identified separately in “LIXIL Sanitation and Hygiene Impact: FYE2025 Progress Update”.