Letter from the Executive Director
Dear Friends,
We are beyond grateful that we can continue our work to make a difference in the lives of so many. Despite 2022 being such a difficult year, we managed to always keep our doors open. We cared for 50,750 patients at our clinics and welcomed 665 babies into the world, among many other accomplishments we are very proud of.
To put things into perspective, Haiti is one of just six countries in the world that has reached catastrophic levels of hunger (IPC level 5), according to data from the World Food Program published in the fall of 2022. This situation is due in part to gangs paralyzing the country, fuel shortages & skyrocketing food costs. Although schools were not open in the last quarter of the year, we were still able to serve 71,030 meals to school children in 2022.
Project Medishare continues to provide quality healthcare to Haitians despite each challenge we face. We are thankful to our loyal supporters for another successful year of helping us make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.
Our community health program is one of our most expansive areas of focus, offering a number of different services in some of the country’s most remote and impoverished areas. Insecurity and fuel shortage contributed to a halt in movement around Haiti throughout much of 2022, which in turn slowed down some of our programs. In spite of the insecurity, we were still able to evalute 234,770 people during home visits.
Project Medishare currently runs two rural maternity centers, as well as mobile clinics, that provide prenatal and postnatal care, delivery services, and family planning to a population of more than 80,000. We also train midwives and community health workers to support pregnant women in their communities. We delivered a total of 665 babies at our clinics in 2022.
Child health and nutrition has been a vital part of Project Medishare’s programs in the Central Plateau for more than 20 years. In addition to patient visits at our fixed-facility clinics and mobile clinics, we also provide home visits and run in-school health and feeding programs. At the end of the year, most of the schools in the Central Plateau and much of Haiti were closed. Because of this, our school lunch program was not running. We are extremely sad when this happens, especially when the country is dealing with record high inflation and food insecurity. When schools were open in spring of 2022, we were able to serve 71,030 meals in total.
Haiti has long faced a lack of educational and advanced training opportunities to develop the doctors, nurses and medical technicians needed in a sustainable healthcare system. Our health agents continued to work hard throughout 2022 in the Central Plateau to provide care and meet once a month for internal training. We also provided training to local midwives and Community Health workers in the earthquake affected areas in the South to ensure they can continue to provide basic healthcare.
Project Medishare has been committed not only to immediate disaster response, but also to medium and long-term recovery projects to build capacity in the health sector and help Haiti recover from natural disasters. In 2022 our efforts continued to support recovery from the 2021 earthquake in southern Haiti. Our team traveled to the south to run mobile clinics that treated over 1,100 patients in the hardest-hit areas. We donated thousands of pounds of medical supplies, clean birth kits and food kits to local organizations. We also provided training to local midwives and health agents to ensure these communities continued to receive healthcare.
