Samahope.org, an organisation that collects donations for patient surgery through partnerships with local hospitals, is now seeking to use the Internet to source for funds.
The organisation has launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to build a crowdfunding portal.
Samahope.org’s new crowdfunding portal enables users to send in their donations without involving a third party organisation.
Samahope then funds patients, or asks the approved partners to post profiles of real patients waiting for surgery. Donors then choose the patients they wish to back and donate via PayPal or credit card.
According to Samahope, it chose Indiegogo as it providesa platform for sending money across the world, as well as allowing project owners to keep 100 percent ownership of their campaign money.
Social entrepreneur Leila Janah, who is behind the project, says she was inspired to start Samahope while travelling in Sierra Leone.
She says she met a met a doctor performing surgeries for women that would be considered routine in developed countries.
According to Janah, an obstetrician and gynecologist called Dr. Darius Maggi travels every year to Sierra Leone to help women who have been neglected or have had little medical assistance, putting them and in many cases the unborn child in peril.
Sama, which means “equal” in Sanskrit, reflects the team’s desire to provide equal access to basic medical care to low-income people.
Janah, who is also the founder and CEO of the non-profit Samasource, hopes the new initiative will help them reach more women.
On a monthly basis, Samahope collects donations for each patient and sends them to the partner clinic performing the surgery, and the clinics post updates on a regular basis so donors may track the progress of the surgeries they fund.
She said: “Childbirth should be a time of simple happiness for a mother and child and their family, but for millions of women in this world, pregnancy and childbirth can be life-threatening, rather than life giving.”
“Procedures that modern medicine considers routine in three-fourths of the world are unknown in the poorest parts of the world. We know that for literally pennies, pooled together through technology, lives can be saved.”
