Friendship is a value-based organisation founded in Bangladesh
in 1998 by Runa Khan and Yves Marre, which identifies and reaches the poorest
of the poor and the most marginalised communities.
Our flagship project is the Lifebuoy
Friendship Hospital (LFH). The LFH was originally an oil barge brought down
from France
by Yves Marre. The discarded vessel was converted to a floating hospital, a
platform to provide healthcare to 4 million of Bangladesh's most marginalised
people. With an aim to provide essential basic services in the most
inaccessible and hard to reach areas, Friendship initially focused on the chars (nomadic islands) and riverbank areas
of northern Bangladesh; places where there was no basic healthcare or education
offered by either government or non-governmental organisations.
The hospital targeted the people living on the shifting islands
at the mouth of the Brahmaputra river; those
who previously had no access to healthcare. Over time we expanded from
providing primary and secondary healthcare to education, income generation,
relief and rehabilitation programmes, and, most recently, interest-free loans
and savings schemes.
From our emergency relief work, especially after cyclone Sidr in
November 2007, stemmed our focus and subsequent activities in the southern part
of Bangladesh.
In recent years, the communities that we work with are seeing the worst effects
of climate change such as seasons drastically changing and crippling
agriculture, increasing floods and land erosion in the north, and increasing
sea level and salinity in the south. To successfully support people who are
having to shift their homes two to three times a year, losing their traditional
source of livelihood, and their land, our programmes have had to integrate the
effects of climate change in order for them to be effective. Currently Runa
Khan is the Executive Director and Yves Marre an Advisor of the organization.
