m2m team at Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Johnson & Johnson is mothers2mothers’ (m2m) longest-standing corporate donor. Following a visit to one of our sites in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 2005, Johnson & Johnson became one of the first to recognise m2m’s potential to change the trajectory of the HIV pandemic and made a first grant of almost $100,000 later that year. This first award was earmarked for m2m to work with pregnant and post-natal women living with HIV and their children in East London, South Africa.

This marked the start of a partnership that has now spanned more than a decade. As well as investing over $15M in m2m since then, Johnson & Johnson has provided m2m with technical assistance and thought partnership, as well as access to high-profile platforms to share our successes and garner further support.

Here are some highlights that Johnson & Johnson’s support has made possible:

• Helping to virtually eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV among our enrolled clients—something we are proud to have achieved since 2014.
• Design, testing, and development of two bespoke mHealth applications that today underpin our impact by allowing us to optimise client service delivery, while ensuring accurate tracking, follow up, and reporting.
• Deepening of our programme footprint and entry into new countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Country programmes directly supported by Johnson & Johnson over the years have included Malawi, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, and Eswatini.
• Programme strengthening and innovation, including the funding of an ‘innovation centre’ in the Eastern Cape, which helped us test and embed new approaches in a cluster of different types of sites.
• Early support for the creation of our first Communications Strategic Plan.
• A fully-fledged spokeswoman programme, which sees us train and mentor talented Mentor Mothers to tell their stories to the world. This has also included the production of professional videos and photos. Johnson & Johnson has supported three classes of spokeswomen since 2011.
• Supporting m2m participation at high-profile and high impact events such as the International AIDS Conference and the UN General Assembly.