Pharma News in Global Health and Sustainability

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will contribute $750,000 to the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign, to create a new online “Operations Room” that will track the scale-up of community health workers and serve as a central database of information for the campaign, which is working with ministries of health in Africa to train, equip, and deploy health workers to provide basic healthcare. By upgrading the quality and expanding the numbers of community health worker systems to provide national coverage, the campaign hopes to help sub-Saharan African countries achieve the health-related Union Nations’ (UN) Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The Operations Room will help identify gaps in the systems and facilitate national and local government agencies’ coordination with UN agencies, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. The Operations Room will be located in Nairobi and Senegal in Africa New York, where the Earth Institute is based. GSK’s support will be directed to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which is running the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign as part of its Solutions Initiative. The SDSN is overseen by a steering committee at the Earth Institute; Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs is also director of the SDSN.