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Community investment

How do you support disadvantaged communities?

We invest money, time and equipment to support disadvantaged communities. Our programmes are long term and help prevent disease and build healthcare capacity in the developed and developing world. We also support projects to improve science education.

What we are doing

In 2007, our community investment was valued at £282 million ($564 million) compared with £302 million ($558 million) in 2006. This is equivalent to 3.8 per cent of Group total pre-tax profits (3.9 per cent in 2006). This year on year change is primarily due to sterling/dollar exchange rate movement.

Method of giving (£ million)

Here we feature two examples of our recent community investments.

Preventing disease – micro-finance and malaria
Micro-finance institutions (MFIs) provide small loans to help poor people start businesses. MFIs financing women in West Africa found that malaria was a cause of clients missing their repayments. With support from GSK, the NGO Freedom from Hunger developed a malaria education curriculum for MFI clients to improve prevention, early detection and treatment of malaria in the home.

The education programme has now been introduced in six West African countries reaching 865,000 people. An impact study assessing the results of the project was completed in 2007. This showed that the programme:

• Improved recognition of the cause of malaria and knowledge that pregnant women and under fives are most vulnerable
• Improved knowledge of preventative measures and increased ownership of mosquito nets
• Doubled the likelihood that participants re-treat mosquito nets with insecticide within six months
• Increased the likelihood that women of reproductive age and children under five sleep under an insecticide-treated net

The study also showed that education must be accompanied with financial support. The most common reasons for non-use of mosquito nets were their expense and lack of local availability.

Building community capacity – Positive Action
This year marked the 15th anniversary of Positive Action, GSK’s programme to support the communities most affected by HIV/AIDS and counter ignorance and stigma surrounding the disease.

In Kenya, discrimination prevents many HIV positive people seeking treatment. Positive Action is partnering with the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) to help people get the care they need within their community through the Zingatia Maisha (Positive Life) programme. This works to reduce stigma by educating health centre staff and community groups about HIV/AIDS. It also supports members of community groups who are living with HIV, helping to increase referrals and adherence to treatment.

Zingatia Maisha has been running for a year and has helped increase treatment adherence rates to as high as 92 per cent in some clinics. Over the three years of the project 38 health facilities will take part.

Q. How do you decide what programmes you are going to support?  

A. Our philosophy is to target support on selected programmes that are innovative, sustainable and which produce tangible results. Regional business managers are involved in the strategy and governance to ensure that programmes supported by GSK fulfil community needs. Most programmes are identified proactively through needs analyses and consultation with partner organisations; this means that we are unable to support most of the unsolicited requests that we receive.

Q. How do you ensure the sustainability of the projects you support?

A. We recognise that it takes time to achieve change so we mainly support long term programmes. However, we help our partners prepare for when GSK funding comes to an end. We ask them to produce an annual progress report so they can demonstrate successes to potential new donors. This evidence can help attract donors.

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