Friendship and Bangladesh:

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.