A partner of the Tulipe association since 2022, The Heart Fund is an NGO founded in 2012 with the mission of giving vulnerable and isolated populations access to healthcare, and more specifically to cardiovascular care. The NGO’s main area of action is Africa, but it was during the war in Ukraine that a partnership was formed with the Tulipe association.
Virginie Gallardo, co-founder and Director of Operations of The Heart Fund with a team of doctors in Côte d’Ivoire
In the first weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Heart Fund decided to join forces with the Franco-Ukrainian organisation Motanka, founded by French photojournalist Gaëlle Girbes. This organisation provides support in the form of medicines to Ukrainian health professionals working in the most inaccessible areas of the country: “We manage all the partnership aspects, the equipment and donations of medicines. Then the NGO Motanka France takes care of transport from France to Poland. Motanka Ukraine, with its network of volunteers, is responsible for collecting and distributing the various health products to the final beneficiaries in areas where other NGOs cannot go,” explains Virginie Gallardo, co-founder and Director of Operations of The Heart Fund. “It was when we were looking for the best organisation to support us in donating medicines, which is highly regulated, that we discovered Tulipe. The association therefore emerged as the main organisation managing this type of aid”, she adds. As a result, since May 2022 in Ukraine, Tulipe health product kits have been regularly delivered to specific areas where needs are particularly targeted by Gaëlle Girbes, who identifies the various beneficiaries on the spot.
The Heart Fund’s first missions involved operating on children suffering from cardiovascular pathologies (DR- The Heart Fund)
Africa: one million deaths a year from cardiovascular disease
The real raison d’être of The Heart Fund has been the fight against cardiovascular disease since it was founded in 2012 by paediatric heart surgeon Dr David Luu. These diseases kill more people than AIDS or malaria. With 17.5 million deaths predicted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for 2021, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. In Africa, they are the cause of at least one million deaths a year. The first surgical missions were organised by the not-for-profit organisation in Haiti, India and Mauritania: “We began by organising international collaborative missions with teams of local and international surgeons to operate on children with heart disease, and therefore open-heart surgery”, explains Virginie Gallardo. Very quickly, as its missions progressed, the NGO team realised that to have a wider impact, in-depth action was needed on prevention to avoid treatment phases as much as possible.
Cardiovascular disease: mobile clinic programmes
The NGO is now focusing on global programmes involving prevention, education, training and treatment. As these actions progressed, we set up the “The Heart Mobile” programme. These are mobile clinics that go out and meet people. It takes the hospital to villages and rural areas to screen for cardiovascular disease and to educate and raise awareness. We also train health workers in the villages and towns we visit in cardiovascular screening”, explains Virginie Gallardo.
Medical staff in the countries where The Heart Fund is active are thus becoming the key players in this mobile clinic programme. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, the mobile clinic is run by a local doctor who is programme manager. Teams of cardiologists are sent out on the various screening campaign missions. To make this work, the NGO raises funds and finds the local partners needed to set up and maintain these structures: “We design the programmes and we also supply the mobile clinic, the diagnostic equipment and all the consumables. These are all the resources that will enable the local teams to carry out all these actions”, stresses the NGO’s Director of Operations.
The Heart Fund wants to continue developing mobile clinics in Africa (DR – The Heart Fund)
Inter-African medical collaboration
The Heart Fund’s actions are both targeted and carried out with a global vision, as Virginie Gallardo explains: “We have been operating in Côte d’Ivoire since 2015. More and more cardiologists are being trained there. We also want to have a presence in Mozambique. There are currently four cardiologists in the country. This is our second current focus. We went on a mission to this country with cardiologists from Côte d’Ivoire to set up an inter-African collaboration with exchanges of practices on medical consultations, cardiology and research topics. The aim is to pool all the data and knowledge to improve people’s health.
“This ecosystem will also enable doctors to be trained and equipped locally”.
As well as continuing to support the Ukrainian population, The Heart Fund’s main objectives over the coming months are to continue developing other mobile clinics. “These programmes are well received by the local population and work very well in the field with local teams. This ecosystem also makes it possible to train and equip doctors locally. We don’t just carry out a screening campaign, but also provide comprehensive follow-up care for patients needing an operation, for example, by organising care. The beneficiaries of this type of programme are not only the patients, but also the doctors, as Virginie Gallardo points out: “There is a real interest for the cardiologists in our programme to go out and meet isolated populations in the field. That’s why we’d like to step up our support in Mozambique and set up more mobile clinics in other African countries. The difficulty right now is funding. With Covid, we have not been able to organise our fundraising events. We are now looking for new financial partners to develop this”.
The challenge for the NGO is to find a way of making its programmes sustainable and autonomous, in particular by finding investors interested in a return on impact or creating social enterprises.
More information on The Heart Fundwebsite
