GSK and Save the Children launch third $1m Healthcare Innovation Award
Howard Lake | 15 July 2015 | News
For the third year pharmaceutical and healthcare company GSK and Save the Children are offering a $1 million Healthcare Innovation Award to reward innovations in healthcare that have helped to reduce child deaths in developing countries.
Organisations across developing countries are invited to nominate their own innovative health approaches that have:
• resulted in tangible improvements to under-5 child survival rates
• are sustainable
• and which have the potential to be scaled up and replicated
The Healthcare Innovation Award was announced following the launch of GSK and Save the Children’s new partnership in May 2013, which aims to save the lives of 1 million children in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Developing country health systems
This year there is a special focus on innovations that aim to strengthen developing country health systems and have proven to help increase access to public healthcare for pregnant women, mothers and children under five.
Ramil Burden, vice-president for Africa and Developing Countries at GSK, said:
“Robust healthcare systems are the backbone of thriving communities but too many countries still lack the trained health workers and facilities they need to manage everyday health challenges, let alone crises like the catastrophic outbreak of Ebola. Through this year’s award, we hope to identify and support those innovations that are most effectively helping to strengthen health systems so that mothers and children are better able to access the care they need, when they need it.”
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The judging panel is co-chaired by Sir Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK, and Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children, and is made up of experts from the fields of public health, science and academia.
As well as providing funding, this year’s Healthcare Innovation Award will provide a platform to review and evaluate new approaches to health system challenges, to recognise those that are having an impact, and share their learnings with the wider global health community.
2014 winners
Last year’s top prize was awarded jointly to the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa and ColaLife in Zambia. UKZN developed a project to promote life-saving breast feeding for vulnerable premature babies including a mobile phone app to aid the safe pasteurization and storage of donated human breast milk.
ColaLife’s project adapted the supply chains used to get soft drinks and other consumer goods to remote areas to deliver a specially tailored diarrhoea treatment kit for infants. Both organisations were awarded $350,000 to take forward their work.
Entries to the 2015 Healthcare Innovation Award close on 7 September 2015 at 11.59pm.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.