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Donate online or mail your contribution to:
Give2Asia
P.O. Box 193223
San Francisco, CA 94119-3223
Make sure to include the name of the fund you wish to support and an address for your receipt.
For donations of securities or other non-cash assets, please download a Gift Form.
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Health Care Access Focus Fund
The Health Care Access Fund offers an opportunity to improve health care in impoverished communities around Asia, partnering with local health organizations that can build sustainable services. A contribution of any size will help make a difference.
Each year, millions of people die unnecessarily of disease and malnutrition because they lack access to basic health care and affordable medication. Even more suffer from debilitating symptoms that prevent them from working and supporting their families. As a result, areas already affected by poverty are unable to prosper and families are left vulnerable. Disparities in health mirror the stark disparities in wealth across Asia, which are perhaps greater than anywhere else on the globe. For example, in India children from the poorest communities are three times more likely to die before the age of five than those in India’s wealthiest communities.
Today, we have the ability to make a significant impact on health care for the poor; yet for many the promise of access to hospitals, labs, medicine, and trained practitioners remains elusive. Focusing on locally run health care services will build capabilities and make a long-term impact on the success of entire communities, and may also have a global impact by reducing both disease and poverty.
The Health Care Access Fund brings locally run health services to those in need. By leveraging our network throughout Asia, Give2Asia identifies groups that focus on both care and prevention. By working with these groups, the fund brings critical programs to underserved rural areas and to some of the poorest communities in the region.
By pooling your contributions with others who care about improving access to health services, you can help combat disease, support health education, and ensure medical services are available where none would otherwise exist. The fund will support projects such as:
1) Supporting health clinics that serve women and children
2) Training health care professionals
3) Creating public health awareness campaigns
Afghanistan, destroyed by decades of war and civil strife, is just one country in which clinics, hospitals, medical equipment, and trained medical professionals are critically needed. Afghanistan has the world’s highest maternal mortality rates, greatest infant and child mortality rates, and lowest life expectancy at birth.
In response to these disturbing statistics, Give2Asia and its donors helped to establish the Afghanistan Institution of Learning’s Mir Bacha Kot rural health clinic, providing funds for equipment, medicine, professional trainings, staff salaries, and health education. The Mir Bacha Kot clinic in Herat province is now serving over 5,000 patients monthly in its central and mobile units and providing health education to another 5,000 women and children per month. Doctors visit six other districts in Kabul province and some small villages near Mir Bacha Kot twice each week through mobile clinics. The mobile clinics see patients who live too far from the central clinic to visit when sick.
The clinic and mobile clinic provide services such as medical examination, drug distribution, drug prescription, application of serums, dressing of wounds, and contraception. The clinic has a nutrition clinic and a pharmacy and performs minor surgery, dentistry, laboratory work, and gynecological exams.
In January 2006, the Chinese government along with World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimated that 650,000 people were living with HIV in China, including about 75,000 AIDS patients. If the disease continues on the same trajectory, UNAIDS and other organizations calculate that by 2010, there could be an epidemic and a HIV-affected population of ten to twenty million in China.
Give2Asia’s partner The China AIDS Media Project (CAMP) is helping to decrease the spread of HIV/AIDS through the creation and distribution of AIDS prevention messages in China. By crafting and disseminating public service announcements and producing documentary programming on AIDS, CAMP has helped broaden the discussion of the disease from at-risk groups (e.g., drug users and commercial sex workers) into the public realm of everyday Chinese family life. The non-commercial messages featuring basketball celebrities Yao Ming and Magic Johnson have reached more than 100 million people, ranging from migrant laborers to urban teenagers.
CAMP’s awareness campaigns have been recognized by China’s Ministry of Health as model HIV/AIDS programming, and in February 2007, its film, The Blood of Yingzhou District was awarded the 2006 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
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Improving Access to Health Care 
An Example: China AIDS Media Project 