Our 2023

From Sudan to Afghanistan, from Uganda to the Mediterranean Sea, over 3,000 EMERGENCY staff have worked together to provide free, high-quality care around the world, every day.

As we reflect on the past year and look ahead to the next, we want to say a massive thank you to all of our supporters, colleagues and volunteers around the world. Without you, none of this would be possible.

Here are just some of the projects that EMERGENCY has worked on this year, with your help:

In Sudan, over 7 million people have been displaced since the outbreak of war. A significant number of the population has shifted toward Port Sudan, where our Paediatric Centre has visited an average of more than 130 children every day since April. Our Paediatric Centre in Mayo has been closed since the war began, and in Nyala since the facility and staff were targets of the fighting in October.

In Khartoum, we reshaped our activities at the Salam Centre complex to respond to trauma and emergency cases while continuing to perform cardiac surgeries, albeit at a reduced capacity. To support our heart patients, we opened satellite cardiology clinics in more accessible areas for those unable to travel to the capital and continued cardiac activities in Eritrea.

In Afghanistan, our Maternity Centre delivered an average of 600 babies every month in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. As the country recovers from decades of war, our Surgical Centres treated more civilian trauma cases than ever before, yet people with war-related injuries still made up more than half of all admitted patients in Kabul.

The protracted legacy of war also continues in Iraq, where we provide long-term physical therapy and prosthesis maintenance to hundreds of people with disabilities, many of whom were injured by ordnance that had been scattered decades earlier.

On board Life Support, our search and rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea, we listened to 1,077 stories of migration. Many people had fled conflict and violence, only to be abused and extorted in Libya. One child told us, “I am an orphan and I left my country because it was at war. In Libya, I was imprisoned: they would undress me, hang me on a hook and torture me. I had no one in the world to ask for money and help.”

In Uganda, our Children’s Surgical Hospital performed around five surgeries every day on patients whose average age is less than six years old. We also launched the affiliated Regional Programme for Paediatric Surgery, identifying and supporting children from across Africa to receive the surgery they need at the facility.

In Sierra Leone, our Surgical Centre continued to deliver key services to the region: acting as the country’s main reference centre for traumatology, referring paediatric surgical cases to the Regional Programme, and providing public health education on the dangers of lye consumption.

In Italy, our psycho-social support projects provided thousands of refugees, migrants and other people in vulnerable positions with basic medical care and assistance accessing the national health system. After extensive flooding in Emilia Romagna in May left over 4,000 people displaced, we coordinated aid distribution and clearing operations, and supported those made socioeconomically vulnerable by the disaster.

Each day, EMERGENCY’s projects put care into practice.

Let’s keep working together to make every year more peaceful and caring than the last.