Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Our plans

Volunteering

From 2009, we will expand our volunteering programme so that every GSK employee can spend at least one day a year helping in their community. Employees will select local organisations to support and will undertake a variety of work for them, ranging from manual jobs to fund-raising. This will include supporting employees that wish to visit schools to encourage science education.

We will also be launching an international assignment programme to enable a select number of employees to use their professional skills to support our non-profit partners for extended periods.

Positive Action

We have agreed to extend three of our larger HIV programmes (Zingatia Maisha in Kenya, Vida Digna in Mexico and Reach India) for an additional year to ensure their sustainability.

We will be working with the Ubuntu Education Fund in South Africa to expand a programme called ‘Living Positively’. This programme will work with men and older boys in Port Elizabeth township to challenge gender roles that exacerbate HIV infection and exclude men from HIV services.

We will be working with AIDS Action Europe to provide networking for HIV/AIDS NGOs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia for improved HIV policy, advocacy and programming and support for those facing the HIV crisis.

We will be working with the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) to expand its initiative to provide prevention, care and support services for men who have sex with men in Asia Pacific. We will also work with AIDS patient groups in the Philippines to increase members understanding of health issues.

PHASE

Our partner Pratham will be implementing the PHASE programme in the slum areas of Mumbai, India. We will also extend PHASE to new districts in Uganda and advocate for the incorporation of PHASE into national policy, enabling sustainability and replication of the project nationwide.

LF

We are increasing our manufacturing capacity for albendazole tablets to 600 million tablets per year by 2010. This will enable us to increase fourfold the number of tablets we donated in 2007.

US

We are continuing to provide leadership and support to the Children’s Health Fund (CHF) Referral Management Initiative to increase access to specialist healthcare for homeless and uninsured American families. We are also supporting a pilot telemedicine project to help patients access specialist care. CHF’s new Memphis Regional Children’s Health Project will serve as the pilot site to link approximately 400 rural patients with specialists at Memphis hospital, using state-of-the-art videoconferencing technology.

Europe, Emerging Markets and Asia Pacific regions

Several new programmes are being implemented. For example

In Greece we are helping to introduce the concept of home-based nursing services for children living with cancer
In the Netherlands, we are supporting a national programme to promote healthy behaviours among young people, helping them to make informed decisions about what they eat and to encourage regular physical activity
We will also seek new partnerships to improve community healthcare through social venture and enterprise projects

Preparing for when the funding stops

Most of our programmes run over a number of years, recognising that it takes time to build change. But from the start we plan for what will happen at the end of our funding.

We work hard with community organisations to bring results over the life of a project (usually around three years) and to help organisations win funding from other sources to continue their work.

From the start we require our partners to work to a budget to make sure funding is spent effectively and produces the right results. We also ask our partners to demonstrate achievements by producing an annual progress report. These reports show evidence of success and are a crucial part of attracting new donors.