Skip to main content

Reach

Emergency Response

A team on the ground within 72 hours — and the discipline to stand down when the response already has what it needs.

The clock

What happens, and when

Emergency response is mostly logistics performed under time pressure. These four phases are the same every time; what changes is who travels and what is in the kit.

  1. 0 – 12 hours

    Assess

    A two-person assessment team travels from the nearest country office. They answer one question: what is the health need that is not already being met by someone else? If the answer is "none", we do not deploy, and we say so publicly.

  2. 12 – 72 hours

    Deploy

    A mobile medical team moves with pre-packed kit held in four regional caches. Composition is decided by the assessment, not by a template: a cholera response and a displacement response need different people.

  3. Week 1 – 12

    Stabilise

    Case management, water and sanitation, and surveillance so the outbreak curve is measured rather than guessed at. We hire locally from week two, which is also when the first handover conversation happens.

  4. Month 3 onward

    Hand over or exit

    Either the response folds into a permanent programme, or it closes and we go. The handover date is published at deployment, because an emergency team that stays indefinitely displaces the health system it came to support.

What travels

Capability, not intention

  • Four regional caches

    Pre-packed kit in Nairobi, Dakar, Amman and Manila — no more than eleven hours from any country we work in.

  • Cholera treatment units

    Modular 60-bed units with their own water treatment, deployable as a single air freight pallet.

  • Cold chain to the last mile

    Solar-direct-drive refrigeration that does not depend on a generator or a fuel supply that may not exist.

  • Surveillance and lab

    Field diagnostics that confirm an outbreak pathogen in hours rather than shipping samples to a capital city.

  • Mental health in the first wave

    Psychological first aid is in the initial team, not a follow-up mission six months later.

  • Local hiring from week two

    Every deployment converts to majority-local staffing inside a month, which is what makes handover possible.

Recent deployments

Where we went, and once where we did not

  • 2026

    Northern Mozambique

    Active

    Cyclone and displacement

    Four mobile teams covering eleven displacement sites, with cholera treatment capacity stood up before the first confirmed case.

    38,000 treated

  • 2025

    Eastern Chad

    Handed over

    Cross-border displacement

    Primary care and malnutrition screening for arrivals, handed to the national health service and a UN partner after nine months.

    104,000 treated

  • 2025

    Southern Malawi

    Closed

    Cholera outbreak

    Two treatment units and a water quality programme. Case fatality held below 1% across the response.

    22,400 treated

  • 2024

    Western Nepal

    Stood down

    Earthquake

    Assessment team deployed and stood down inside five days: the national response was already adequate and a second organisation would have added coordination load, not capacity.

    No deployment

Deploying is not automatically the right call. In Nepal in 2024 our assessment team found a national response that was already adequate, and a second international organisation would have added coordination load rather than capacity. We stood down in five days and published why. That decision is as much a part of this capability as the deployments are.

The reserve is what makes 72 hours possible

Emergency response cannot wait for an appeal to be written. It is funded from an unrestricted reserve, held ready, and replenished by regular giving.

Support the reserve See our impact