Meet Heba Rashed, the 40 year old founder of the Mersal Foundation. It's the first charity in Egypt to tackle discrimination in the country’s public healthcare system, by providing health services to underprivileged and marginalized people who would otherwise slip through the cracks.
For fifteen years Heba worked as a commercial linguist and project manager while volunteering at a local charity on the side. Disturbed by the gaps in public healthcare, Heba left the corporate world in 2015 to launch a non-governmental health care program with the help of two friends. Starting with a single donation of $1,300, Heba challenged the existing bureaucracy by using social media to source donations. Within five years her grassroots project has transformed into a foundation of 200 employees, five independent clinics, a medical hostel and a free cancer treatment centre.
When Egypt’s public health system struggled to cope with the COVID pandemic last year, Heba rallied her troops and quickly raised funds for sanitization products and medical supplies, as well as launching a 24 hour hotline that handled 60 to 70 coronavirus emergencies per day. With so many people unable to afford hospitalization, the Mersal Foundation became a lifeline for families, paying for beds in private hospitals and providing oxygen tanks to people in need.
Heba made BBC’s list of '100 Women of 2020' and true to her foundation’s slogan of “opening a new door of hope” she is determined to grow her network of doctors and hospitals and inspire a new culture of inclusive healthcare beyond Egypt and throughout the Arab world.
Meet Karen Atekem, a 30 year old healthcare worker from Cameroon working with the nomadic Massangam people to help them eliminate the tropical disease onchocerciasis, also known as ‘river blindness’.
Growing up, Karen heard stories about the Massangam nomads and after years of working with them, came to deeply respect their culture and travel patterns. Nomadic tribes are a challenge for many healthcare workers in Africa as they often miss the routine community health interventions and as a result, curable infections like onchocerciasis lead to irreversible blindness.
Karen has taken a different approach. She schedules her health-checks around the Massangam’s migration patterns rather than the other way around. Three times a year she uses satellite imagery to locate the tribe and travels over ten hours by car, motorbike and on foot through remote, unmapped regions of the country to treat them. Together with her team, Karen spends one month every year with the tribe, testing and treating individuals with river blindness and training members of the community to become liaisons between the researchers and their communities, an essential step in building trust.As testament to this, a few months ago when Karen didn’t show up as expected, members in the community sent their 19 year old liaison on a long hike to access a phone and call her. Karen informed him about the COVID pandemic and shared vital information about how his community could take precautions. “These people love their health and are willing to do whatever it takes to protect it,” she says. “Providing equitable medical care means everyone has a right to treatment, not just those who are settled — nomads, too.” Global Citizen
