What do Merlin do?

Merlin is a British medical charity driven by one aim: to provide health care for people at times when they are most in need. Merlin believes that everyone has a right to essential health care. They are helping to achieve this directly through good quality programmes on the ground and indirectly through influencing the practice and policy of others.

Responding to natural disasters

• The Ayyarwaddy Delta area of Myanmar was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, leaving more than 130,000 people dead or missing and a million displaced. One-third of the 550 health workers that Merlin had trained in the years prior to the cyclone died. Some survivors lost their entire families. But within days of the cyclone they and Merlin teams were at work treating the injured, distributing food and materials for repairing damaged homes, repairing water supplies to prevent disease outbreaks.
• Merlin responded to severe floods Bangladesh, Uganda and western Pakistan in 2007 that left millions homeless. Medical teams traveled by jeep, in boats, and sometimes on foot to reach affected areas.
• In the aftermath of the earthquake which devastated northern Pakistan in 2005, killing 73,000 and leaving two million homeless, Merlin established five field clinics and an air mobile medical team. We worked through the winter in remote mountain villages to treat the injured and prevent outbreaks of pneumonia and diphtheria.
• Merlin arrived in Sri Lanka less than 48 hours after the Tsunami disaster of December 2004, and was the first international health NGO to plan a co-ordinated relief effort with the local Ministry of Health. We were also on the ground in Indonesia and Myanmar
   

Help in times of conflict

• In Darfur (Sudan), Merlin’s 10 fixed and nine mobile health clinics cater to thousands of people who have fled their villages to escape the violence in the region, as well as to the populations who now host them. About 270,000 people are treated each year.
• When large-scale violence broke out in Kenya over presidential elections in December 2007, Merlin was the first medical agency to respond, running mobile health clinics for 40,000 displaced people in Nakuru and Nyanza districts.
• Merlin has been working since 1997 in Africa’s deadliest conflict zone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, provide essential medical support for more than 100 primary and secondary health facilities which serve a million people.
• Merlin was one of the first international NGOs to enter Baghdad after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003, distributing medical aid to revitalise primary and paediatric health care, and providing water and sanitation equipment to prevent disease outbreaks.

Preventing disease

• In mid-2007, cholera and measles – a major killer of children – swept through the masses of people displaced by conflict in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Merlin mobile health teams performed mass measles vaccinations and set up cholera treatment programmes. Disease rates dropped dramatically.
• In Kenya Merlin is working with the government on malaria prevention and treatment programmes; HIV/AIDS prevention, behaviour change and treatment projects; and on TB control through early diagnosis and better treatment, a model of comprehensive care is being copied in many parts of Africa. More than 110,000 people a year are benefiting.
• In its founding year, Merlin vaccinated 10,000 children against measles in the troubled Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus. Since then our programmes have supported immunisations campaigns to protect children from deadly diseases throughout Africa and Asia.

Rebuilding health systems

• Merlin has established a community midwife education system in Takhar Province, Afghanistan, where 86% of women give birth without a skilled attendant and the maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world, at 1,900 per 100,000 live births.
• Following the destruction of Liberia’s health infrastructure in the civil war, Merlin worked in seven counties to provide health care, water and sanitation, repair health facilities and train health staff for a population of 1.7 million people.
• In Ethiopia, Merlin has helped to establish a primary health care service in the drought prone region of Oromiya which serves 600,000 people.