When looking for our second recipient for this year’s Amazingy Charity Box donation, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) was one of the first that came to mind – a long-standing charitable organization that is well-known for its humanitarian efforts worldwide, whose actions are guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality. They provide medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare in almost 90 countries, with teams made up of tens of thousands of health professionals, logistic and administrative staff – most of them hired locally ♡

Médecins Sans Frontières is an international organization. How does that work when a crisis occurs/war begins? Do you send people from any part of the world to the area, or do you also work with a lot of local organizations?

Médecins Sans Frontières works in more than 70 countries worldwide and is often already active in a given country when a crisis occurs. Examples of this are Ukraine, where we were already caring for people with tuberculosis before the war, or Haiti, where we provided medical aid in several regions of the country at the time of the earthquake. In these situations, it is possible to shift the focus and react quickly to the current crisis.

We also have pools of staff around the world, including logisticians, midwives, doctors, nurses and surgeons who have already gone through an application process and are ready to leave. This way we can regulate quickly and without complications.

In our projects, the teams are made up of internationally and nationally recruited staff. For every internationally recruited staff member, there are about ten nationally recruited staff members.

Could you tell us a bit more about your help in Ukraine?

Médecins Sans Frontières supports people displaced by the war throughout Ukraine, including in Berehove, Chernihiv, Dnipro, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kropyvnytsky, Mukachebo, Uzhgorod, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhya. In particular, the need for psychological assistance for displaced and traumatized people, and medical assistance for patients with chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and epilepsy, is constantly growing. For them, it is difficult to get the treatments and medicines they need due to the war. Since the beginning of the war, we have brought more than 485 tons of medical and humanitarian supplies to Ukraine, we train and advise Ukrainian hospitals on how to deal with war injuries and emergencies where large numbers of patients are admitted simultaneously, and we provide care to people in various cities in our mobile clinics.

What other projects are you working on that we should know more about?

The overall humanitarian need worldwide is very high, and there are many other significant missions besides our work in Ukraine and neighboring countries that also require our full support – for example, in Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria. In addition to our medical aid, we continue to bear witness transparently and comprehensively to the fate of those people whose suffering receives little or no media attention.

How can we help? We know that donating helps to provide relief, but is there a way to volunteer as well? 

In addition to financial donations, project assignments are also a way to support our work. For this we are looking for different professional profiles: from the medical, but also from the manual-logistical and commercial-administrative area. The project assignment lasts at least nine, but usually twelve months. Our application procedure is generally such that interested parties cannot apply for specific countries or projects. After a successful application process, we decide on the basis of the current urgency in which of our worldwide projects new employees will be deployed.

We can imagine that in crisis situations it is sometimes very difficult to remain neutral. How do you guarantee this?

Alongside impartiality and independence, neutrality is one of the most important principles of our work. Especially in areas riddled with major conflict, it is only by acting neutrally that we can help the people who urgently need our help. We are active where people need us, often on both sides of the conflict or war. If we as a humanitarian organization want to reach people in need, we have to be respected by all actors involved. That is why we communicate our neutrality in all our areas of operation. This includes that we do not comment on political and military decisions in the countries where we are active.

Transparency with big charities is a big issue. We chose Médecins Sans Frontières because we feel you are very genuine, and a high percentage of the donations go straight to the projects. Could you elaborate a bit more on this?

The majority of the donations we receive go directly to emergency medical aid. In 2020, that was just under 90 percent. The largest sums we have spent on aid in countries with long-lasting crises, examples including South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The remainder is divided between donation management and solicitation, as well as general administration and public relations.

To date, our position is that the scope of our projects should be based only on need, not on the amount of donations received. For this reason, donations without earmarking are particularly helpful for our work. In this way, we can quickly help those who need our emergency aid most urgently. Transparency is important to us in many ways, so we regularly publish reports and evaluations on our project work and take a stand on humanitarian and medical debates. With public events, we put controversial topics of humanitarian aid up for debate. In our annual report, we give an account of our finances.

Alongside the collateral damage that war brings, what are some of the biggest problems you are trying to solve or alleviate with the projects you fund?

Beyond aid in conflict and war zones, there are various issues that are the focus of our work. Among them is our sea rescue mission. Médecins Sans Frontières has been active in the Mediterranean since 2015, as medical assistance is urgently needed to rescue people in distress at sea. Since May 2021, we have continued our assistance in the Mediterranean Sea with our own chartered ship: the Geo Barents. The goal of the mission is to save the lives of refugees and migrants who are making the dangerous crossing from Libya to Europe, and to provide them with medical care.

In addition, Médecins Sans Frontières has been working for more than 20 years through its Medicines Campaign to make life-saving medicines affordable and accessible to all people worldwide. This includes the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as diseases for which effective treatments have been available for some time, such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. We are also committed to promoting research into new drugs and therapies for neglected diseases such as tuberculosis, kala-azar and Chagas.

Far too often, women die, for example, from lack of health care during pregnancy and complications during childbirth. They do not receive appropriate treatment after sexual violence or have to undergo unsafe abortions due to restrictive laws, stigmatization and taboo. That’s why, with our focus on women’s health, we work to ensure that every woman and girl receives the health care they need to lead a healthy and empowered life.

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Half of the proceeds from this year’s “Do Good, Look Good, Feel Amazingy” Charity Beauty Box will be donated to the international humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières gespendet!