How we operate

Sebsibe meeting with local villagers

Sebsibe on the road

One of our partner hospitals

Project Harar began in 2001 in the ancient city of Harar and now covers a large portion of eastern Ethiopia, come rain or shine, all-year-round.

Treatment for facial disabilities is freely available in the capital city, Addis Ababa, but the communities we work with cannot access it. The cost of a parent and child travelling for treatment in the capital is equivalent to a coffee farmer’s entire annual household income. Our health outreach service addresses this problem, enabling young people from the rural Haraghe region to access essential medical treatment.

What do we do?

Our two Ethiopian employees, Sebsibe and Biniyam, cover great distances across eastern Ethiopia, liaising with community leaders and health officials to contact people living with facial disabilities. They explain the treatment available, providing information sheets and photographic processing to help candidate patients make an informed choice.

If the candidate patient decides to have treatment, Sebsibe and Biniyam arrange transport for them with a parent or guardian to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Ethiopia has just one public hospital for every 780,000 people, and this is the only place where they can receive treatment for their disability. To cut costs patients travel in groups of ten, driven by a known and trusted driver.

We arrange accommodation for patients and their guardians during their stay in the capital. The treatment is generally carried out by skilled Ethiopian surgeons. In complex cases, we work with other NGOs who send groups of European doctors out to Addis Ababa.

The patients normally stay in Addis Ababa for a week, accompanied by Sebsibe or Biniyam. Afterwards, they return back to their home villages in eastern Ethiopia. We monitor their progress and offer secondary treatment when required, especially for the more complex cases.

Each group costs just £2,500, a cost of £250 per child. It’s not much, but it completely transforms the child’s life. They return to their village empowered to take their place at school, grow up alongside peers, and in time to have their own family. Past patients have described how the treatment enabled them to participate in community life: attending school, finding work, and going to market with confidence. Meyrama, a patient treated in 2010 for noma, recently got married. Before the operation her disability prevented her from eating properly, and marriage was unthinkable to her.

We now also offer training and capacity building for local health and government officials. They learn how to recognise different facial disabilities, reducing the workload for Sebsibe and Biniyam. By enabling local networks to recognise and refer facial disabilities to us, we greatly increase our reach across Eastern Ethiopia. Our previous patients frequently attend the workshops, explain their problems to the health workers and help reduce the stigma surrounding the condition.

How we’ve grown

Our partnerships with Ethiopian hospitals and other NGOs have allowed us to grow at an exceptionally fast rate. The line on the following graph shows how the number of patients treated has grown; from under a hundred in 2006 to almost 600 in 2010. The columns shows how our income has grown over the same period.

With more money, we reach more patients - it's that simple.