Text 10. Social Agencies. Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders, international humanitarian organization that provides medical assistance to victims of armed conflicts, famine, epidemics, and natural disasters. The organization’s headquarters is in Brussels, Belgium. Its division in the United States, Doctors Without Borders, is based in New York City.

Each year more than 2,000 Mйdecins Sans Frontiиres (MSF) volunteers provide medical aid to people in more than 80 countries. As part of its mission, MSF also seeks to draw public attention to the plight of suffering people around the world and to speak out against human rights abuses that its volunteers witness. The organization obtains more than half of its funding from private donations. Other donors include the European Union, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and national governments. MSF is not affiliated with any government.

MSF recruits physicians, nurses, and other health professionals to serve volunteer tours of duty ranging in duration from a few months to more than a year. MSF pays volunteers a small stipend and covers living expenses. Volunteer teams work in battle-line hospitals, refugee camps, disaster areas, and towns and villages that lack adequate medical care. They provide emergency and primary medical care, perform surgery, give vaccinations, establish medical facilities, and provide water supplies and sanitation. MSF also helps relaunch or create medical facilities on a long-term basis in countries that either are recovering from war or are in acute poverty. In these instances, volunteers rebuild hospitals and health centers, train local medical staff, and work with local health authorities. MSF volunteers often travel to areas of political instability, and several volunteers have been killed in the line of duty.

MSF was founded in 1971 by a small group of French doctors, most of whom had worked for the Red Cross in relief efforts during the late 1960s. The doctors felt that existing aid organizations offered too little medical assistance and often did not intervene rapidly enough. The group’s first mission was to Nicaragua in response to an earthquake in 1972. In the mid-1970s the organization provided medical care in Vietnam and treated Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in Thailand. In the 1980s MSF launched a number of aid missions in Africa, providing food to victims of civil war in Uganda and to victims of famine in Ethiopia and Sudan.

In 1990 the group opened Doctors Without Borders in New York City. The office was the organization’s first outside of Europe. In 1991 MSF traveled to Kuwait hours after the end of the Persian Gulf War to treat freed prisoners. In the early and mid-1990s the organization ran relief efforts in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, and Rwanda.

In 1999 the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (see Nobel Prizes). The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited MSF’s “pioneering humanitarian work” and its adherence to “the fundamental principle that all disaster victims, whether the disaster is natural or human in origin, have a right to professional assistance, given as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

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