About MSF
Today Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is one of the world's leading independent organisations for medical humanitarian aid, giving quality medical care to people caught in crisis regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation. Every day, more than 30,000 MSF field staff across 74 countries provide assistance to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from healthcare or natural disasters.
In 2018 MSF worked in 446 projects across 74 countries. Thanks to our 6.3 million donors we were able to treat millions of patients. In 2018, MSF carried out over 11 million outpatient consultations and admitted over 750,000 patients. MSF teams assisted more than 300,000 births, including caesarean sections, vaccinated around 1.5 million people against measles and meningitis, and treated almost 2.4 million people for malaria. There were over 74,000 severely malnourished children admitted to inpatient feeding programmes, over 400,000 individual mental health consultations and over 100,000 major surgical interventions.
Formed in 1971 by a group of doctors and journalists who aimed to establish an independent organisation focused on emergency medical care and speaking out about the causes of human suffering, MSF's work is based on the humanitarian principles of medical ethics and remains committed to bearing witness.