2024: A Watershed Year for Healthcare Resilience

In our efforts to combat childhood cancer in lower-income countries, we now have 49 ongoing programs across 54 nations and have published 264 scientific publications. Since the launch of the program, we have trained over 50,000 healthcare professionals and impacted the lives of more than 141,000 children across 87 countries. The 2024 My Child Matters grants program is prioritized projects which address access to care or early diagnosis, with the next generation of projects kicking off in 2025.  

This year, we received over 400 proposals for our Climate and Health Resilience Program and selected 60 projects spanning 28 countries. These initiatives are all committed to investing in innovation, focusing on enhancing health resilience in the face of the climate crisis.

Through the work of our Collective Minds Climate & Health Council, we continued to advocate for the health resilience of climate vulnerable countries and shared our voice to ensure more finance reaches communities on the frontlines of the climate crises. We are proud of the report launched by the Council (add link to report) and the collective effort to mobilize political action from Council Members and partners while at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September (add link to video).  , Separately, we are thrilled by the approval of the Green Climate Funds’ USD$37 million project to increase health resilience of 8 districts in Southern Malawi (add link). Foundation is proud to have contributed $1 million to this project along with the Government of Malawi, Save the Children, and other partners.   2024 also marked the launch of our Local Campus Solutions Africa (add video link), a first of its kind event that brought together 200 frontline actors from 17 African countries in Dakar to share innovative solutions, all focused on spearheading local action for climate adaptation and health resilience.

In the fight against sleeping sickness, we are on target to eliminate the disease by 2030 and have achieved a 97% global reduction to date, with 8 countries eliminating the disease so far. In 2024 we achieved a major breakthrough - the WHO designated Sanofi and the DNDi’s oral treatment as the first-choice treatment for this acute form of sleeping sickness disease and expanded its approval to treat an additional strain of the disease. This marks a significant advancement for patients, having so far only very limited therapeutic options and requiring hospital administration under strict supervision.

Since the launch of Foundation S, we have reached 24 million people through our humanitarian emergency response program and have supported over 25,000 rare disease and haemophilia patients with life lifesaving medicines.  None of our humanitarian efforts would be possible without the collective effort of all our employees who help research, develop, and ship our medicines to people who need them and to partners like the World Federation for Haemophilia, Project Hope, Direct Relief, Tulipe, Red Crescent / Cross, WHO Foundation, UNICEF, UNHCR, and many others.  

In just two years, Foundation S has built a solid basis of legitimacy and efficiency, paving the way for the creation of a fifth pillar dedicated to "Les Grandes Causes France”. By leveraging existing health initiatives within Foundation S and the wider group, this new commitment area will ensure we are able to extend our reach and strengthen our impact with new and existing partners in the community where we work.