Hathim Ahmed in his pharmacy
near Khartoum’s main children’s hospital. Many people in Sudan
struggle to afford even basic medicines. Photograph: Hannah
McNeish
With NGOs seen as a political
threat, a volunteer initiative that links doctors and pharmacists
with donors is funding much-needed healthcare
“If these guys weren’t here I’d
start to sell things from my home, like my bed, chairs and cooking
utensils,” says Arafa Moussa
A tea stall under a tree on one
of Khartoum’s busiest roads doesn’t look like much to pin your
hopes on when seeking to cure a sick child. But dozens of anxious
parents and unrelated strangers rush to places like this across
Sudan every day – the former to press prescriptions
and the latter cash into the hands of volunteers managing a
crowdfunding operation that saves children’s lives.
The operation, set up in 2012,
received donations of some $220,000 (£176,000) for medicines in
2014, and also collected $533,000 to open children’s intensive care
units in two hospitals in the capital.
“If these guys weren’t here I’d
start to sell things from my home, like my bed, chairs and cooking
utensils,” says Arafa Moussa, who has come from the Jaffar Ibn Ouf
children’s hospital across the road to get help to pay for her
son’s medicines. Since her husband had a heart attack and lost his
job last November, they have not managed to pay the monthly 2,000
Sudanese pounds (£248) to manage their eight-year-old’s rare
condition of aplastic anaemia.
“If he didn’t get the medicine,
he would bleed from his nose, eyes, ears and whole body,” says
Moussa, wiping her tears as she talks about trying to sell the
family home to pay for the bone marrow transplant he can only get
abroad.
It was seeing children with
cancer in pain that led around 15 young Sudanese volunteers to
establish the crowdfunding initiative, called Sharia’
al-Hawadith.
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It was named after a street
lined with medical facilities, and which roughly translates as
Accident Lane. It is now home to a small army of young volunteers
who sit under a tree sipping endless cups of tea between racing off
to get prescriptions for parents who turn up or call from
hospital.
Decades of conflict and the
resulting sanctions against the regime of President Omar al-Bashir
have crippled investment and development. International NGOs have
struggled to operate in a climate of government suspicion and
restrictions, which includes limiting the medical work of Médecins
Sans Frontières and the Red Cross.
“Our government doesn’t want
[NGOs] here … there were so many, but they were driven out,” says
Hathim Ahmed, one of many pharmacists working with Sharia’
al-Hawadith to provide medicines that most insurance won’t cover.
None of the volunteers are paid.
The initiative does some
preliminary means-testing by speaking to parents, and asks them to
contribute between 10% and 50% for expensive medicines or to buy
the cheap ones themselves. For those who can’t contribute, Sharia’
al-Hawadith bears the total cost.
“About 25% of the people I see
can’t afford to pay for treatment or medicines,” says junior doctor
Leben Khair, who has volunteered for Sharia’ al-Hawadith since
discovering that most insurance policies only pay for up to 10% of
medicines and that “even private insurance doesn’t cover the
expensive ones”.
In Sudan, while NGOs have
floundered, such online crowdsourcing models have prospered,
allowing people to donate for medicines, books, blankets or food
without going through an organisation that could be considered a
political threat.
“We publish the daily needs in
the Facebook page … and we write the medicines or the cheques we
need to do today,” says Ibrahim Alsir Alsafi, a journalist, who –
like most other volunteers – spends a day or an evening a week
sitting at the tea stall the street.
Ayman Saeed, one of Sharia’
al-Hawadith founders, says not being an NGO has its advantages. “It
gave us more room to move freely and expand as much as we can, and
our [decentralised] management system … was a good strategy.” He
says it gives people the chance to approach the concept in their
own way.
More than 100,000 people follow
the Facebook page where the prescription requests and the
whereabouts of sick children are posted. With volunteers working in
all of Sudan’s 18 states, and most children’s hospitals, people can
give money personally or send it through people they know living
locally. “Sudanese people – most of them from outside Sudan – help
us by transferring lots of money. We don’t have a bank account but
they transfer it to their relatives here and they come to give it
to us by hand,” says Alsafi.
The initiative requires a level
of trust between pharmacists and volunteers, who all keep accounts
of what has been bought or given on credit per shift. Some people
who donate, especially for chronic cases or for first-time donors
and who want to see where their money’s going, meet the patients,
and sometimes, like the volunteers, get to know their families
quite well.
Some pharmacists in Khartoum say
that per shift they can give away anything from 200 to 2,000
Sudanese pounds’ worth of medicine, but that they trust the
initiative and know they will be paid.
“Sometimes people go to the
pharmacy and they just pay our debts for the whole month,” he
says.
The largest donation received
was from a wealthy Khartoum woman who didn’t have cash so turned up
with her gold jewellery. When the dealer found out the money was
going to charity, he paid double for it.
People living abroad also
respond to the regular calls for drugs that are not available in
Sudan, or are extremely expensive imports, by sending them over.
“Antibiotics, especially injectables, are very expensive, and
cancer drugs per injectable dose can cost 900,000 Sudanese pounds.
A course of 28 tablets can cost 1.5m,” says Ahmed.
Since running his own pharmacy
in the hospital district, Ahmed, like many other pharmacists, has
worked with different charitable funds and given away drugs to
needy customers for years. He now extends credit to Sharia’
al-Hawadith to reach increasing numbers of poor people who have
been hit by inflation and a falling currency, which puts medicines
imported from Europe or the US even further out of
reach.
“People are really getting
poorer and poorer every day; things are getting worse, so we are
trying to help,” he says.
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