Development Ratings

Health Unlimited’s focus is on providing mainly rural, remotely located and often indigenous people with long-term primary health care and preventive measures. In 2008, some of Health Unlimited’s activities included:

training over 34,000 people in appropriate health methods and practices, including village doctors, birth attendants, local health workers and pharmacists, and workers in trades exposed to HIV/AIDS;

giving out 115,129 insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets, over 22,000 test and treatment kits for malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS, and some 51,000 condoms;

immunising over 27,500 children and over 6,000 women;

supporting some 2,000 CSOs with total membership of over 50,000 people;

providing 2,189 drinking water filters; and

providing maternal and general health services to nearly 330,000 people.

Extrapolating the effect of training, dissemination, preventive measures and clean water provision and protection, we estimate that HU directly met the health care needs of 8,738,000 people at the community level.

Health Unlimited also delivers cost-effective health practice messages through radio soap operas in Cambodia, Rwanda, Somaliland and Guatemala. With assistance provided by the producers and actors of The Archers BBC radio programme, the approach is to mix drama, humour and education. Focus group interviews provide often sensitive subject matter for development into future storylines. Radio is a popular medium in largely illiterate regions. A survey in 2003 in Rwanda found that some 73% of the population listened to the HU-sponsored radio programme twice a week. A similar outreach process is carried out through community theatre, quiz shows, role-playing, phone-in sessions, newsletters and magazine columns. Using a statistical best estimate approach of listener numbers, Health Unlimited now believes it reaches 14,500,000 people a year. This could be an under-estimate due to radio signal coverage reaching beyond country borders.

Health Unlimited operates in a range of African, Asian and Latin American countries. It primarily targets remotely-located indigenous people. In the period 2004 to 2008, the number of projects rose from 20 to 36. Currently, the number of projects in Africa and South East Asia is 11 in each area, and is 7 in each of East Asia and Latin America. Projects spending on all Asian programmes makes up 48% of the total. Health Unlimited works to build community and government health care capacity and influence policy. The organisation has partnerships with NGOs and CSOs in all the countries it operates in as well as having formal partnerships with universities, governments and global development organisations. The charity has multi-year contracts with the local government and the World Bank to deliver health services in remote regions of Cambodia. It is still considering expanding into two new fragile states: Nepal and Sudan.