GSK's $750,000 grant to help train health workers in sub-Saharan Africa

GSK has announced it is to contribute US $750, 000 to the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign – an effort to broadly expand the reach of healthcare services in sub-Saharan Africa.

The campaign, in partnership with the Ministries of Health in Africa, aims to train, equip and deploy enough health workers to provide basic healthcare to millions of underserved people.

GSK's funding will be used to create a new real-time online "Operations Room" that will track the scale-up of community health workers and will serve as a central database of information for the Campaign. The "Operations Room" will help identify gaps in the systems and help national and local government agencies coordinate with UN agencies, private corporations and the many non-governmental organizations working on the continent.

"Trained community health workers are the backbone of the health system in Africa, providing essential services to the poorest communities. We are delighted to support this campaign and to further expand our commitment to improve access to healthcare in Africa. By generating valuable new information about the numbers, capability and quality of community health workers currently working in Africa, we can help support systems to deploy them most effectively and transform healthcare in rural areas."

Duncan Learmouth, Senior Vice President, Developing Countries and Market Access, GSK.

"This generous grant from GlaxoSmithKline is key to scaling up Community Health Worker (CHW) systems across sub-Saharan Africa. Community health workers provide vital services to rural communities and GSK has been a pioneer and trail-blazer in the deployment of CHWs across Africa. The 1 Million Community Health Worker Campaign will save lives and help rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa to break free of extreme poverty. By promoting the deployment of 1 million CHWs by 2015, roughly 1 per 100 households in rural areas, the campaign will support sub-Saharan Africa to make major strides towards the Millennium Development Goals."

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

GSK has a long-term commitment to investing in community health worker training and since 2010, has re-invested 20% of the profits made in the world's least developed countries back into training community health workers.

By upgrading the quality and expanding the numbers of community health worker systems to provide national coverage, the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign hopes to help sub-Saharan African countries achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015.