Fistula Foundation

Fistula Foundation is committed to providing life-transforming fistula repair surgeries to the world’s most vulnerable women. According to a peer-reviewed analysis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, there are over one million women suffering with obstetric fistula around the world. This number is always top of mind for us at Fistula Foundation—while we provide thousands of surgeries each year, we know that there are many more women still waiting for treatment. This is what motivates us. We believe that no woman should be forced to live in misery simply for trying to bring a child into the world—and we will continue to work until obstetric fistula is eradicated globally.

We have always been thoughtful about our strategy and have maintained a keen focus on delivering the greatest possible impact with our resources. Our top priority is funding fistula surgery because we know that surgery is the only cure for obstetric fistula, and there are very few alternative sources of funding for surgery. Patients are usually extremely poor and lack the political capital to force governments to help—and so for the foreseeable future, funds to treat patients will have to come from donors.
We specifically avoid mission creep and only support activities that directly enable the treatment of women or remove a critical bottleneck to treating more women. This means we limit our funding to hospitalization, surgery costs, surgical equipment and patient outreach. We have not funded other programs presented to us that don’t align directly with our focus on fistula treatment, for example, lobbying, academic research, midwifery training and contraceptive provision.
In addition, we operate Fistula Foundation with a lean model, keeping headcount low and being extremely cost-sensitive in all decision-making.

Where many aid organizations spend a majority of their funds on their U.S.-based operations, we turn that model around: over 80% of our revenue goes to work on the ground where we help build the capacity of strong African and Asian medical partners. We do our homework upfront about potential partners and only invite funding requests from solid, reliable programs. We closely monitor results to ensure quality of care, working directly with doctors and hospitals in developing countries, rather than through intermediaries, wherever possible. This helps build medical capacity where it is needed most—Africa and Asia—while helping us keep our operating costs down.
We operate by best practice standards, and secure validation from all key industry watchdogs including Charity Navigator, Guidestar, GreatNonprofits, The Life You Can Save, The Better Business Bureau, and Charity Watch. While our staff and board strive to adhere to the highest fiduciary standards, we want to prove it to you, too. We believe these multiple ratings also strengthen our fundraising efforts by giving donors big and small confidence that their hard-earned donations will be used to help women.

Fistula Foundation is the global leader in the battle against obstetric fistula—we fund more surgeries than any other organization. In 2022, we celebrated 70,000 women transformed by fistula surgery. To date, we have supported partners across 150 sites in 33 countries throughout Africa and Asia.
Each of these milestones was made possible by our phenomenal community of tens of thousands of donors from over 80 countries who share our mission to end the suffering caused by obstetric fistula.
We are also proud of our countrywide treatment networks in Kenya, Zambia, and DRC, which continue to grow. The type and scale of this project is a global first— no other organization in the world has delivered a comparable nationwide infrastructure for fistula care.
We are looking ahead to bringing this game-changing model to other countries as funding allows.