To help respond to a shortage of seven million health workers worldwide and a growing overall burden of disease, CARE International UK has joined GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as the implementing partner of GSK’s 20 per cent Reinvestment Initiative in Asia.

This corporate community investment initiative aims to reinvest 20 per cent of the company’s profits into strengthening of community health systems in six of the least developed countries in which GSK operates. This strategic partnership between CARE and GSK focuses on improving maternal and neonatal child health by improving the quantity and quality of frontline community health workers in the most remote and marginalised communities in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Nepal. Through a mix of programming, lesson-learning and advocacy efforts, the initiative hopes to galvanise further national and international action on the health workforce issue.

ODI was commissioned to produce a series of reports capturing the impact of project interventions and analysing and documenting CARE’s best practices.

The CARE-GSK partnership has completed its first phase (2011-2015) and plans to continue and scale up its projects between 2015-2020.