Why I Co-Founded Humanity Direct
Approximately 1.75 billion children and adolescents worldwide do not have access to safe, timely, or affordable surgical care. This means congenital anomalies go unrepaired, treatable injuries result in lifelong disabilities, and children die of easily correctable surgical problems such as incarcerated hernias.
It doesn’t have to be like this, and that’s why I co-founded Humanity Direct along with Marc Shalam, to give children the surgery they need.
Why Children Wait Years for Surgery in Uganda
Uganda has limited medical resources, and Mulago National Referral Hospital (the largest healthcare provider in Uganda) perfectly illustrates the issues.
Mulago has a surgical waiting list of three years. Emergency trauma, particularly from Kampala’s notorious boda boda motorcycle taxis, fills intensive care beds. With frequent head injuries and very few helmets, the ICU is often full. Elective children’s surgery must wait. And wait.
At Mulago, it’s not uncommon to see children left alone for months, sometimes up to two years, while waiting for surgery. Parents leave small amounts of money and return to their villages to care for other children. Roughly 30% of Humanity Direct’s patients come from referrals by students and staff at Mulago who simply cannot bear to see these children forgotten.
Even when healthcare is technically ‘free’, only the labour is covered. Patients must still pay for equipment, scans, medicines, surgical supplies, and hospital stays. For a subsistence farmer living on the equivalent of $1 a day, that might as well be a million dollars. Families regularly arrive in Kampala with $10 (about 50,000 Ugandan shillings). Within days, that money is gone on food alone. An operation is simply impossible.
A Simple Model for Funding Surgery in Uganda
Nick and daughter Angelica Meeting paediatric consultant Dr Sekabira at Platinum Hospital.
We wanted to provide safe, timely, and free surgery as seamlessly as possible. We realised that by setting up a website, someone sitting at a laptop thousands of miles away could easily fund an operation for someone living in a remote village in Uganda.
It was important to us that donors could see where their donation went and the impact it had, so we built a charity to do just that:
- Established a team to host surgical clinics and coordinate operations
- Created a website to host basic patient details so donors could donate and directly fund operations
- Bought a van to transport patients to and from their homes
- Built a network of surgeons able to perform a wide variety of operations
- Ensured regular updates on patients whose operations have been funded
All donations are sent directly to Platinum Hospital to cover the operations. Overheads are paid separately from sources such as Gift Aid or grants specifically for charity administration.
Building Trust in Communities Across Uganda
It has taken time to build trust among the communities we serve, and we’ve learnt that encouragement, patience, and cultural sensitivity are just as important as scalpels.
Turning up and offering free and safe surgery had never happened before in the areas we visit, and initially it created suspicion. Some families feared a hidden motive and worried it was a ruse to take children away.
Dickson, our programme coordinator, has taken time to build trust in the areas we work. This includes holding clinics with surgeons so everyone can ask questions, ensuring a parent or guardian always accompanies the child throughout their treatment, and – over time – people have seen children returning from hospital happy and healthy.
Ensuring Surgical Care Reaches Those Who Need It Most
The demand is almost limitless. The need in rural Uganda remains profound. To help direct our support where it’s needed most, we take referrals from four main routes:
- 30% from Mulago referrals
- 30% from district nurses who call directly
- 30% from rural outreach
- 10% from word-of-mouth recommendations
The outreach work is particularly demanding. Our Toyota Hilux drives into some of the most remote regions of Uganda, where district health centres are warned in advance. On arrival, 300 to 400 children may be waiting. We triage those who need surgery most, ensuring we take on only what we have the capacity for.
Partnering with Surgeons to Deliver Affordable Surgery in Uganda
Humanity Direct is fortunate to partner with Platinum Medical Centre in Kampala. By bringing grouped surgical cases and significant patient numbers, they are often able to provide operations at around a third of the market rate.
Over the past 12 years, they have completed 4,000 operations, roughly one every day.
Thanks to new surgeons including maxillofacial surgeons and orthopaedic surgeons joining Platinum, we can now perform four times as many. The limiting factor is no longer surgical skill. It’s funding.
Help Us Expand Surgery for Children in Uganda
We never set out to build a vast charity. We set out to build the simplest possible way of solving a problem.
A system where every donation is traceable, every aspect of a child’s medical care is covered from start to finish, and donors can see the impact their contribution has made.
The need in rural Uganda remains profound. But over 12 years, thousands of children who would otherwise have had no chance now walk, see, breathe, and live free from treatable conditions.
My recent trip to Uganda showed that we’re now in a fantastic position to dramatically scale up the number of operations we can perform. Over the next few months, we’ll be focusing on raising funding so we can give thousands more children the safe and timely surgery they need.
If you are in a position to help us scale up our work, please contact hello@humanitydirect.org