Bringing Resources to Bear to Improve Global Health

At Pfizer, we believe our business and societal missions are the same: Ensuring all individuals everywhere have access to quality medicines, vaccines and health care, and the opportunity to lead healthy lives.

Every day, we strive to use our full resources – our people, products and funding – to find new ways to positively impact the health of people around the world and across their lifespan.

Historically, the private sector has focused on traditional philanthropic approaches of large-scale cash and product donations to address global health needs. However, against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world, companies like Pfizer are also changing their approach to global health. We now aim to build on our current footprint of programs with new approaches and solutions that reflect the unique needs of each community – and ultimately accelerate the impact we can have on the health of all people around the world.

To achieve these goals, we must reach patients who are in need faster and build sustainable infrastructure – while being careful not to compromise quality or safety. We also know efficiency must be balanced with evidence of effectiveness. As such, we work with our partners to take a measured approach, using our analytics and research resources to collect outcomes data before launching at scale. Nearly all of our initiatives to improve global health begin as pilot programs; only after careful evaluation of effectiveness and consideration of local nuances do we expand our programs to serve a broader population.

As one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, we see it as our responsibility to leverage all of our resources – financial, medical, scientific, colleague – to achieve the speed-to-impact that is required in today’s environment.

Advancing the Health of Women and Children in the Developing World

Empowering and educating women is vital to global health

The Pfizer Foundation’s* Global Health Innovation Grants aim to improve health delivery and support social innovation with a direct focus on improving health care access and quality for women. These grants address key barriers to health care access that women face. A key component in achieving these objectives is the support of women entrepreneurs with financing and technical assistance to allow them to grow their businesses and improve the health delivery, access and quality for women.

ayzh is a social venture in India that provides appropriate health products to improve women’s health (reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent) in low resource settings. ayzh’s core product is a $3 Clean Birth Kit, which provides women essential components recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for a safe and hygienic birth. Pfizer’s support has helped ayzh to expand its services in India, including hosting empowerment camps to directly engage approximately 1,000 pregnant women to-date on the elements of a healthy and hygienic birth. Additionally, our program will help fund the creation of two additional manufacturing and distribution hubs, which employ local women, and is expected to impact the lives of 18,000 mothers and babies through the project period.

Jacaranda Health provides affordable, high-quality maternity services to underserved women in Kenya through a network of maternity hospitals and by building partnerships with hospitals and clinics. Jacaranda’s work focused on improving the critical capacity and skills gaps that can be an impediment to quality care. Pfizer’s support allowed Jacaranda to pilot an innovative approach to sustaining and retaining critical emergency obstetric and newborn care skills in government hospitals. The program trains midwives in government hospitals in evidence-based emergency obstetrics and newborn care, and trains volunteer nurses as peer educators who will provide ongoing education for the maternity nurses.

One Family Health, a primary health care chain in Rwanda, delivers quality, affordable primary care through a franchise clinic model, each led by nurse entrepreneurs. The clinics are led by nurses who receive financial support, business training and technical assistance to help improve their impact in the community. Pfizer’s support has helped One Family Health to add five new clinics in 2016 and reach an additional 191,000 patients. Additionally, we have supported critical improvements to the business and finance training curriculum that the nurse entrepreneurs receive.

Pfizer is committed to helping broaden access to our long-acting injectable contraceptive for women most in need of contraceptive options in some of the world’s poorest countries. Through collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, we were able to provide this contraceptive for one dollar (U.S.) per dose to qualified purchasers.

A consortium of public-private sector donors and aid organizations have played an important role in helping reach these women, by supporting country introductions and the delivery of our long-acting injectable contraceptive to health facilities and community-based distribution networks. Since the product’s launch in 2014, over six million doses have been shipped to 20 developing countriesⁱ.

Learn more about the work Pfizer is doing to help expand access to contraceptives in the Access to Medicines and Third-Party Collaboration sections.

i Data on file at Pfizer Inc.

“Through a lot of hard work and constructive ongoing collaborations, we have made great progress in making this long-acting injectable contraceptive available as an option to hundreds of thousands of women living in sub-Saharan Africa and we are looking to expand our collaborations to other countries in 2017. We hope to continue the momentum achieved to date, enabling us to further help provide access to a range of options for family-planning needs of women in the developing world.”

John Young
President, Pfizer Essential Health

Creating a Blueprint for Disease Elimination

Morocco is the second country in the world to achieve a trachoma-free designation, following Oman in 2012

After more than six decades of fighting the spread of trachoma in Morocco, on November 14, 2016, the WHO acknowledged that the Moroccan government has eliminated the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness as a public health problem.

Pfizer's antibiotic donation, in partnership with the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI), as well as the implementation of the WHO-recommended SAFE strategy (Surgery to treat the blinding stage of the disease, known as trichiasis, Antibiotics to clear infection, Facial cleanliness, Environmental improvement including better access to water and sanitation to help reduce transmission), played pivotal roles in accelerating Morocco’s ability to reach this milestone.

Nearly a decade ago, Pfizer made the decision to support the ITI in its bold goal to eliminate trachoma. Founded in 1998 with a grant from Pfizer and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the ITI, of the Task Force for Global Health, an independent not-for-profit, aims to meet the WHO’s call to eliminate trachoma by 2020.

It's an integrated approach. And we're always looking across all the countries for examples of innovation and entrepreneurship, where hygiene promotion, production of soap, sanitation, school-based programs, and so on, are being used in different and innovative ways in order to reach more people.
Paul Emerson, Ph.D.
Program Director, International Trachoma Initiative (ITI)

Key to expedited progress against the goal of total elimination is collaboration, and the ability to create an environment in which this debilitating disease can be successfully and sustainably eliminated as a public health problem. Alongside a variety of partners representing governments, global health agencies, academia and advocacy objectives, Pfizer is taking a holistic approach – not only providing financial resources and medicine donation, but also making the best use of all of the company’s resources to help build health care capacity, offer community support, and create a strong and stable health care foundation for communities in need.

Since the partnership was formed, this initiative has treated more than 100 million people in 36 countries. The watershed milestone of elimination of trachoma in Morocco is a true demonstration of how social entrepreneurship and partnership can work together to speed improvement of the health of individuals worldwide. It is our hope that this holistic approach can serve as a blueprint for the elimination of other deadly diseases in the future.

If you define a social entrepreneur as someone who is taking the initiative, trying to innovate, being persistent in order to solve a social issue, then I think that the trachoma elimination program is built on these individuals.
Julie Jenson
Director Corporate Responsibility, Pfizer

Responding to a Global Need through Expansion of a Humanitarian Assistance Program

It is our responsibility to support countries in need via comprehensive humanitarian assistance

Pfizer colleagues around the world work collaboratively with governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil service organizations, health care providers and payers to enable prevention and treatment of diseases by making medicines and vaccines available to as many people as possible. We use our resources to create and offer tiered pricing strategies and humanitarian assistance in low- and middle-income countries with great need.

This year, Pfizer expanded its humanitarian assistance program to enable broader access to a vaccine used to protect infants, young children and adults against a disease caused by a certain type of bacteria. In humanitarian emergency settings, Pfizer is offering its new multi-dose vial of this vaccine at what will be the lowest prevailing global price. Further, given the acute need for aid on the ground, Pfizer will donate all sales proceeds for the first year of this program to humanitarian groups undertaking the difficult work of reaching vulnerable populations in emergency settings. Learn more about how we are using scientific innovation to maximize our humanitarian assistance abilities.

Pfizer is proud of the significant impact that our vaccine and our partnerships with many humanitarian organizations have had on public health across the globe. Only by putting the needs of refugees at the center, can we all work collaboratively to help prevent disease in some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Susan Silbermann
President and General Manager, Pfizer Vaccines

Additionally, Pfizer donates a variety of products to assist with humanitarian emergencies, including essential health and over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. For example, in response to Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, Pfizer donated antibiotics and sterile injectable medicines to various NGOs providing near-immediate health care to affected populations.

Through our work with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, we have pledged to supply 740 million doses of one of our critical vaccines through 2025 to infants at an affordable price in the world’s poorest countries with a significant burden of disease. These types of partnerships help Pfizer speed access to lifesaving medicines and critical vaccines to communities most in need.

* The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organization established by Pfizer Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.