Muntada Aid’s Little Hearts Programme is Helping Libyan Government to Improve Health Services

About Little Hearts  

Little Hearts is Muntada Aid’s flagship project and was launched in April 2012. Muntada Aid provides free life-saving heart surgeries to children with congenital heart defects from underprivileged backgrounds irrespective of gender, race or religion. Since 2012, it has carried out 43 missions in 12 countries and performed over 2,600 cardiac interventions and surgeries saving thousands of lives.

The charity has assembled a team of volunteer doctors, nurses and other medical professionals for this mission who will arrive in Libya this week. They will be operating on children this week and aims to treat a minimum of 50 children. 

Libya remains one of the most complex and dangerous countries for travel. This North African country remains cut off from most of the world, with barely any international flights into the country and the upcoming Little Hearts mission will take place at Al Bayda Medical Centre in Al Bayda, Eastern Libya.  

Kabir Miah, Little Hearts Programmes Manager at Muntada Aid, commented,

" The country has a long waiting list of children suffering from congenital heart defects as there is a shortage of specialist interventional cardiologists who can provide the necessary treatment.

Taking missions of this nature into Libya is hugely cumbersome and risky. For each such deployment, our programmes department must arrange a team of diverse volunteer medical professionals from various parts of the world. We also need to ship medical supplies into the country. Such missions are tricky even under normal circumstances, and when you add armed conflict and political instability into the mix, it's a different ball game altogether. But as always we remain committed to our mission."

An estimated 1. 5 million children are each year born with a congenital heart defect (CHD) globally. 10% of babies born with CHD do not survive their first year of life. 1000s more die and don't reach adulthood. In poor underdeveloped countries, the lack of specialised medical infrastructure means babies born with congenital heart defects have little or no access to necessary treatment.

About Muntada Aid

Our mission is to develop healthy and sustainable communities worldwide. Through implementing our innovative social, economic, education, and health and wellbeing programmes we want to empower those denied social justice and human dignity, in order to make a lasting change in the world.

At Muntada Aid, we believe that by working in partnership with other organisations we can create greater and more sustainable projects for those we are working to help. By bringing together expertise and resources, not only are we able to grow and learn, but we are able to have a greater reach and achieve much more to help those in need.