News & Stories
Told in their own words
Every story on this page is published with informed, revocable consent. Names are used where the person asked for them to be.
412,000
Safe deliveries supported since 2015
Clean Hands Healthy Babies Northern Ghana
Amara, 29
“The midwife walked eleven kilometres to reach me.”
Amara went into labour six weeks early, at night, in a village with no vehicle and no phone signal. Her neighbour walked to the next village to reach Comfort, a midwife trained and employed through our maternal health programme.
Comfort walked back in the dark and arrived a little after two in the morning. The delivery was complicated and she managed it alone until the referral vehicle reached them at dawn.
Her daughter is three now, and has never missed a check-up.
9,800
Lay counsellors trained and supervised
Promoting Health Behaviors Bihar, India
Ravi, 41
“I did not know what depression was. I only knew I could not get up.”
Ravi stopped working in the spring and could not explain why. There was no psychiatrist in his district — not a shortage, none at all — and the nearest hospital that could have helped was a day of travel and a month of wages away.
The counsellor who eventually saw him was a schoolteacher from two villages over, trained over five months through our lay counsellor programme and supervised weekly. They met eleven times, in Ravi’s own language, in a room he already knew.
He returned to work after four months and now helps run the local support group.
94%
Recovery rate in outpatient treatment
Promoting Health Behaviors Turkana County, Kenya
Fatuma, 34
“They screened all four of my children in one morning.”
The screening team reached Fatuma’s settlement during the second failed rainy season. Her youngest measured in the red on the mid-upper arm circumference band — severe acute malnutrition, the point at which a child can die within weeks.
He started outpatient therapeutic feeding the same day, at home, which meant Fatuma did not have to choose between an inpatient bed for one child and the three she would have had to leave behind.
He recovered in nine weeks. The family is now in the food security programme.
87%
Of water points still working after 5 years
Cambodia Malaria Elimination Volta Region, Ghana
Dr. Kofi Mensah
“Clean water did what no amount of medicine could.”
Dr. Mensah has run the district hospital for nineteen years. For most of them, his paediatric ward was full of children with diarrhoeal disease, and his team responded to an outbreak roughly once a month.
Four years after the water points went in, and after the maintenance committees had proven they would keep them running, the outbreak response rota was quietly stood down.
Paediatric admissions for diarrhoeal disease fell by two thirds.
How we handle consent
No photograph or story of a patient is published without informed, revocable consent, taken in the person’s own language and separately from their treatment. Anyone can withdraw consent at any time and we remove the material without asking why. Where someone asked to be identified only by a first name, that is what appears.