Community Investment

• Seeing is
  believing
• HIV
  education
• Women's
  empowerment
• Fighting
  malaria
• Employee
  volunteering
• People
  in Action
• Our
  performance
• News

Our performance

In 2007 we continued to build on our investment in the communities we serve. We also strengthened our leadership in the areas important to us, such as HIV/AIDS and Employee Volunteering. In total we invested USD24.5m in the community.

We committed ourselves to setting an annual budget for Group-wide community expenditure. The target agreed was 0.75% of the previous year's trading profit operating profit. In 2007, we invested 0.77% within the communities we live and work.

We successfully piloted two new projects in 2007. GOAL is a womens' empowerment initiative in Delhi. Our global Employee Volunteering scheme has enabled thousands of our employees get involved in our community programmes.

Establishing ways of measuring the value of our investments to the community and the Bank is ongoing. Monitoring and evaluation were built into GOAL and our Employee Volunteering programme from the start. We are now looking at how we can apply this methodology to other initiatives.

We cemented our reputation as thought leaders in HIV/AIDS by signing up to the Clinton Global Initiative and supplying a senior member of staff as Chairman for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in Gambia.

Our Sustainability Review 2007 (PDF, 2.3MB) contains detailed information of our performance, metrics (PDF, 39KB) and our plans for 2007.