Crisis in Care is a rapid-response campaign launched in early 2025 by former USAID staff to provide urgent bridge funding to local HIV organizations after the abrupt termination of USAID's HIV programs. The shutdown left more than 150 frontline partners across Africa, Asia, and Latin America without funding overnight - putting millions of lives at risk and threatening to unravel decades of progress in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment. Crisis in Care was built to keep these local organizations operating while longer-term solutions were put in place. (crisisincare.org)

Through Crisis in Care, Surgo Foundation funded the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT), a Kenyan NGO operating across 16 counties. The grant sustains case management and treatment continuity for 2,814 children and adolescents living with HIV in Mombasa and Kilifi, covering:

• Frontline staffing - case manager and mentor mother stipends.
• Household support - school fees and supplies for the most vulnerable families.
• Emergency assistance - food and transport for urgent needs.
• Clinical monitoring - viral load testing to track treatment effectiveness.

AMURT's prior USAID-funded work supported over 12,000 people living with HIV in 2024 and drove a 115% increase in HIV testing uptake among adolescent girls and young women in Mombasa County over six months. This bridge funding preserves those gains while county governments, private-sector partners, and Village Savings and Loan Associations build longer-term sustainability.

Jhpiego is a global health affiliate of Johns Hopkins University that partners with governments, health experts, and local communities to build sustainable maternal and reproductive health systems in low- and middle-income countries. The need in India is acute: every year, more than 5 million babies are born with low birth weight (LBW, under 2,500g), facing a 20-fold higher risk of neonatal mortality and significantly elevated risks of undernutrition, long-term neurodevelopmental challenges, and non-communicable diseases later in life. (jhpiego.org)

Surgo Foundation's partnership with Jhpiego and Johns Hopkins University provides technical assistance to government health systems through EMBRACE - Empowering Mothers with Birth Readiness, Agency, and Care - a program that scales two proven interventions for reducing LBW:

• Single-dose IV iron - treats moderate-to-severe maternal anemia and has been shown to reduce LBW risk by 13%.
• Cash+ nutrition support - pairs direct cash transfers with culturally tailored nutrition counselling for pregnant women and has been shown to reduce LBW risk by 20%.

Each supported district annually reaches 18,000-23,000 pregnant women, with the potential to avert up to 1,300 LBW cases and save 520 lives while preventing thousands of cases of childhood wasting, stunting, and neonatal complications.

EMBRACE also generates catalytic evidence on adjacent drivers of LBW to inform the next generation of maternal and newborn health policy in India:

• Preconception nutrition and care.
• Home-based care of newborns.
• Calcium supplementation.
• Multiple micronutrient supplements.

The KANPE Foundation is a women-led organization founded in 2010 by Regine Chassagne and Dominique Anglade that works with isolated rural communities in Haiti's Central Plateau to deliver health, education, agriculture, and economic empowerment programs through a community-led model. Over 15 years, KANPE has built deep trust and infrastructure across five remote communities in the Baille Tourible section - operating with 90% staff retention, partnerships with Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health) and Summits Education, and a track record that includes a secondary school pass rate near 100%, a fully self-sustaining microcredit program, and a health clinic serving 10,000 consultations a year. In many of these communities, the most pressing need today is clean water: the burden of collecting it falls primarily on women and girls, limiting their access to school, work, and economic opportunity - and compounding the health risks that come with contaminated sources. (kanpe.org)

Surgo Foundation is supporting KANPE's Access to Water initiative - a baseline assessment to expand sustainable access to clean water across four communities: Boucantisse, Elmani, Corail, and Marecage. This builds on KANPE's successful rehabilitation of the water system in Baille Tourible, where the organization restored a damaged aqueduct, repaired six fountains, and constructed eight new ones, eliminating the long-distance water collection that had burdened women and girls for years.

The new assessment, conducted by Haitian firm Expert Eau Haiti, combines technical analysis with deep community engagement:

• Technical analysis - evaluating water sources and existing infrastructure across the four communities.
• Local leadership - establishing community committees to lead implementation and long-term maintenance.
• Training - equipping families and schools with knowledge of water filter use and hygiene practices.
• Pilot filter distribution - providing immediate access to clean water while testing usability and maintenance under real conditions.

The findings will define the technical requirements, system design options, and costs needed to deliver context-appropriate, community-led water solutions in some of Haiti's most isolated communities.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) is an international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency care in conflict zones, disease outbreaks, and other crises, operating independently of any government, religious, or financial interest. In 2024, the Democratic Republic of Congo experienced an unprecedented surge in mpox cases as the virus mutated to enable sustained human-to-human transmission. Cases appeared in camps for displaced people, where overcrowding and lack of clean water and sanitation accelerated the spread - with children, pregnant women, and immunocompromised individuals facing the most severe illness. In August 2024, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, warning it had the potential to spread across Africa and beyond. As of mid-2025, DRC had reported more than 20,000 cases. (msf.org)

Surgo Foundation supported MSF's emergency response in Equateur Province, where teams established treatment projects in Bikoro and Iboko beginning in July 2024. Over the first six months, MSF treated 291 suspected cases - roughly 60% of whom were children under 15, and more than half classified as severe - while keeping the case fatality rate below 3%.

Beyond direct medical care, MSF teams worked to contain the outbreak and strengthen community resilience:

• Household decontamination - 123 households decontaminated to prevent further transmission.
• Clean water access - boreholes rehabilitated to restore community water supply.
• School hygiene - hygiene kits and handwashing stations distributed to schools.
• Community education - 61 community leaders trained to deliver health education through churches, schools, and local associations.

The project also strengthened the local health system for the long term:

• Clinical training - Ministry of Health staff trained on recommended treatment protocols.
• Antibiotic stewardship - reducing irrational antibiotic use.
• Diagnostics and referrals - improving sample collection and patient referral systems.

MSF's independence from government funding, supported by private donors like Surgo Foundation, allows its teams to respond based on need alone and to remain on the ground in some of the world's most severe emergencies.

The Piramal Foundation is an Indian philanthropic organization led by Ajay Piramal that strengthens public health and education systems by embedding leadership development, digital tools, and community ownership inside government infrastructure rather than running parallel services. The need is concentrated in India's most underserved states - Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha - which bear a disproportionate share of the country's health and education burden, with the weakest indicators nationally for maternal and child health, nutrition, and learning outcomes. The public systems serving these communities exist but underperform: frontline health workers lack training and support, data systems are fragmented, government officials receive little leadership development, and proven interventions reach only a fraction of the people who need them. Closing this gap requires not a parallel system but a fundamentally different approach to strengthening the one that already exists. (piramalfoundation.org)

Global Alliance for Viksit Bharat (GAVB)

Surgo Foundation is partnering with Piramal Foundation through the Global Alliance for Viksit Bharat (GAVB), a $500 million, ten-year initiative to lift 70 million Indians out of multidimensional poverty by strengthening public health and education systems from within. Led by Ajay Piramal and building on a model proven in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, GAVB works across six pillars - service delivery, human resources for health, procurement and supply chain, strategic financing, governance, and data systems - embedding leadership development, digitization, and community ownership into government infrastructure at scale. Piramal Foundation has reached over 143 million lives across 27 states and trained more than 50,000 government officials through its School of Leadership, now scaling to 150,000 per year.

The Child Nutrition Fund is a UNICEF-led multi-partner financing platform that coordinates and scales evidence-based nutrition interventions across 63 of the world's highest-burden countries. The need is staggering: around 148 million children under five are affected by stunting and 45 million by wasting globally, while one billion women worldwide suffer from undernutrition. Undernutrition weakens children's immunity, prolongs illnesses, and contributes to nearly half of all deaths among children under five - yet current global financing for nutrition remains fragmented, with some regions oversupplied and others critically underfunded. Closing this gap requires not just more money but a fundamentally different approach to how nutrition investments are coordinated and sustained. (childnutritionfund.org)

Surgo Foundation supports the CNF, which uses a three-window structure to address different bottlenecks in the nutrition financing ecosystem:

• Program Window - coordinates evidence-based interventions including maternal nutrition, breastfeeding support, complementary feeding, micronutrient supplementation, and treatment of child wasting.
• Match Window - doubles every dollar a government invests in nutrition supplies, incentivizing domestic ownership.
• Supplier Window - provides advance payments to local manufacturers of ready-to-use therapeutic food, unlocking production capacity where it is most needed.

In 2024, CNF-supported programs reached 2.8 million women with prenatal supplements and treated over 582,000 children for severe wasting, while the Supplier Window has enabled $345 million in therapeutic food orders since inception. The goal: reaching over 320 million children and women annually with life-changing nutrition programs by 2030.

Partners In Health (PIH) is a global health organization that delivers high-quality care in some of the world's poorest communities by partnering with national governments to strengthen public health systems rather than running parallel services. The need is acute: in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between what communities need and what health systems can deliver comes down to people - the continent bears 24% of the global disease burden but has just 3% of the world's health workforce. In Rwanda, PIH (known locally as Inshuti Mu Buzima) set out to prove that this gap could be closed by partnering with the Ministry of Health to strengthen public health infrastructure from the ground up, starting with some of the country's most underserved rural districts. (pih.org)

Surgo Foundation's support of PIH in Rwanda advanced two complementary streams of work:

• Medical education - in collaboration with Harvard School of Public Health, PIH used seed funding from Surgo to help develop the medical school curriculum that became the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), a pioneering health sciences university in Butaro, Rwanda, co-founded by the late Dr. Paul Farmer and now ranked among the top universities in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Community health access - across Rwanda's rural districts of Kayonza, Kirehe, and Burera, PIH trained and deployed networks of community health workers to deliver HIV/AIDS care, maternal and child health services, and integrated primary care to more than 860,000 people.

Using HIV/AIDS as the entry point, PIH built broader primary care capacity that the Rwandan Ministry of Health incorporated into its 2009 National Health Sector Strategic Plan - translating a district-level pilot into a national model now studied worldwide for building strong health systems in resource-limited settings.

Partners In Health (PIH) is a global health organization that delivers high-quality care in some of the world's poorest communities by partnering with national governments to strengthen public health systems rather than running parallel services. The need is acute: in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between what communities need and what health systems can deliver comes down to people - the continent bears 24% of the global disease burden but has just 3% of the world's health workforce. In Rwanda, PIH (known locally as Inshuti Mu Buzima) set out to prove that this gap could be closed by partnering with the Ministry of Health to strengthen public health infrastructure from the ground up, starting with some of the country's most underserved rural districts. (pih.org)

Surgo Foundation's support of PIH in Rwanda advanced two complementary streams of work:

• Medical education - in collaboration with Harvard School of Public Health, PIH used seed funding from Surgo to help develop the medical school curriculum that became the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), a pioneering health sciences university in Butaro, Rwanda, co-founded by the late Dr. Paul Farmer and now ranked among the top universities in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Community health access - across Rwanda's rural districts of Kayonza, Kirehe, and Burera, PIH trained and deployed networks of community health workers to deliver HIV/AIDS care, maternal and child health services, and integrated primary care to more than 860,000 people.

Using HIV/AIDS as the entry point, PIH built broader primary care capacity that the Rwandan Ministry of Health incorporated into its 2009 National Health Sector Strategic Plan - translating a district-level pilot into a national model now studied worldwide for building strong health systems in resource-limited settings.