Kailakuri Health Care Project

Established by New Zealander, Dr Edric Baker, the Kailakuri Health Care Project (KHCP) currently has 93 fulltime staff who provide health care to over 47,000 people in rural Bangladesh. These are some of the poorest people in the world with the average household income of only $100 a month. KHCP also known as health care for the poor by the poor, is so effective that it is held up as an exemplar for health care in very poor countries.

Rather than coming in providing assistance and leaving, KHCP is an ongoing programme which employs former poor patients and trains them to be paramedics, mother-care experts and health care educators. The staff having been patients themselves are able to connect with the patients while at the same time providing the essential health care that they desperately need.

Many of the KHCP programmes achieve success rates equal to or better than Western hospitals. The mother-care programme (based on the NZ midwife practices put in place at KHCP by New Zealander, Libby Laing) is particularly effective, for example diseases such as measles are rarely seen due to 100% of children in the community being immunised.

How can you help?

The patients pay what they can, however being extremely poor they cannot afford to pay the full cost of treatment. It is therefore necessary to raise money for medical supplies and to cover running costs, such as staff salaries.

The annual cost of the incredible work done by KHCP is $467,000 (less than the salary of one surgeon at a Western hospital).

Here is an example of some of costs per year for just a few areas*:

• Antenatal, health and nutrition support for one mother and a child: $20

• Supervision and treatment of a diabetes patient: $70

• Average salary of one full time staff member: $1644

• 2000 (of the 47,000) general outpatients seen (includes salaries and medication): $4800

*(Statistics from 2015 KHCP annual report)

The Kailakuri Health Care Project is a NZ registered charity, and has the Health Education NGO, Mati, as its partner.

Please contribute what you can. All fundraising is done by volunteers so 100% of your donation will go to helping the poor in rural Bangladesh in an empowering way.