Community investment

Wherever AstraZeneca is located worldwide, we aim to make a positive contribution to our local communities through sponsorships, partnerships, charitable donations and other initiatives that help to make a difference.

Backed by our Global Community Support Policy, our activities around the world are focused on bringing sustainable benefit in ways that are consistent with our business of improving health and quality of life. Our contribution to better health is founded on the research and development of innovative medicines, so we also look at ways in which we can promote the value of science among young people and encourage the scientists of the future.

AstraZeneca Young Health Programme

One fifth of the world’s population is aged between 10 and 19 years old and many of these young people don’t get the support they need to deal with the health challenges that can significantly impact their lives.

Our AstraZeneca Young Health Programme is designed to help young people in need around the world understand and deal with the health issues they face. Adolescent health remains an underserved part of the healthcare care agenda and this is a long-term investment programme that aims to make a measurable and sustainable difference, helping to improve a generation’s health. Find out more

Sharing information and best practice

We have a dedicated community support database that gathers global information centrally, enabling the sharing of information across the organisation, encouraging best practice and supporting accurate financial reporting of our overall spend in this area. The database is also another means of ensuring that our efforts are aligned with our commitment to bring benefit mainly through healthcare and science education initiatives. AstraZeneca is a member of the London Benchmarking Group (LBG), a group of over 120 companies worldwide working together to measure community investment. Our membership of LBG provides the platform for improving how we capture our total community contribution, and will enable us to assign a tangible monetary value to the time and services of our employees where they are involved in community activities.

Our performance

In 2011, we spent a total of $1.27 billion ($1.41 billion in 2010) on community partnerships and charitable donations worldwide, including our product donation and patient assistance programmes which make our medicines available free of charge or at reduced prices. Read more