Merck views its corporate responsibility toward society not only in terms of paying taxes and creating or maintaining jobs. Rather, we are convinced that we can make an important contribution to society with our knowledge, our skills and our products.
Our corporate social responsibility activities are primarily focused on those areas in which we have specific expertise stemming from our core businesses. For example, we participate in health care projects for socially disadvantaged people. We support education, specifically in the natural sciences, and promote culture and sports in the vicinity of our sites. We also provide disaster relief if an emergency should arise, especially in those regions in which we operate.
To increase the effectiveness of our projects, we have consolidated our resources into three global lighthouse projects:
Within the scope of the Merck-Praziquantel Donation Program, we are partnering with the World Health Organization (WHO) to combat the worm disease schistosomiasis in African school children.
The Global Pharma Health Fund is a non-profit initiative funded by Merck to fight counterfeit medicines in developing and emerging countries.
The Merck Philharmonic Orchestra is the musical ambassador of our company.
In addition, our subsidiaries carry out local projects in which they actively participate. We have defined criteria for selecting projects; the decisions concerning certain projects are made by our subsidiaries locally. The Group function Corporate Communications in Darmstadt is responsible for coordinating the global lighthouse projects. The Executive Board receives regular reports on the progress of the projects.
To ascertain the regional breadth of our social commitment, to determine the goals and focus as well as to track the development thereof over time, we conduct annual global surveys. The first one took place in 2008 and related to the activities of 2007. In 2010, we invested a total of EUR 6.9 million in corporate social responsibility activities. This figure does not include activities that primarily serve to market our products. We document donations to
patient organizations in Europe separately and publish this information on our website. Of the total monetary and non-monetary donations by our subsidiaries abroad in 2010, 37% were made in Asia, 29% in Europe, and 17% each in Latin America and North America.
Since 2008, we have also been collaborating on the Corporate Social Responsibility project of the Bertelsmann Foundation. A method to measure and evaluate social responsibility has been developed in order to better estimate the impact of projects. We have applied this method to our donation program to combat schistosomiasis and can evaluate the progress of the project in the evaluation model.
