Watsi

Watsi is on a mission to make healthcare a reality for everyone. Through innovative technology and remarkable storytelling, Watsi directly connects people with the funds necessary for life-changing healthcare, creating healthier lives, thriving communities, and stronger health systems. Watsi has catalyzed $18 million to transform the lives of 30,000 patients across 33 countries through access to high-impact surgical care.

The Problem
The global burden of surgically treatable conditions is five times greater than malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS combined. Yet, accessing safe surgery is a challenge that remains vastly underfunded. Each year, 17 million people die due to lack of surgical care, and 81 million face catastrophic impoverishment when seeking essential and emergency surgery.

At the core of health disparities is the phenomenon of the health-poverty cycle, where income inequality leads to the worsening of social and built environments that foster poorer health outcomes. Poverty increases the risk of inadequate nutrition, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions, leading to poorer health. Illness reduces a family’s productivity and pushes them further into generational poverty due to lost earnings and educational opportunities on top of high costs for accessing essential healthcare. This negative feedback loop unnecessarily forces families in vulnerable communities into even greater risk of deep poverty, disease, and early death. Without rapid and accelerated investment in surgical scale-up, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will continue to have losses in economic productivity, estimated cumulatively at $12.3 trillion between 2015 and 2030. We have an incredible opportunity to reimagine healthcare systems of the future and build a world with health for all 一 ensuring where you live doesn’t determine whether you live.

The Solution
Watsi utilizes innovative technology to directly connect people to fund high-impact surgical care, creating healthier lives, thriving communities, and stronger health systems for patients in LMICs. Watsi focuses on addressing critical financial barriers to accessing healthcare — disrupting the health-poverty cycle and the long-term need for traditional philanthropy through the creation of a people-powered philanthropic movement that directly connects those in need of healthcare with those who want to help.

Watsi catalyzes private capital toward critical global health financing by enabling anyone, anywhere to directly and efficiently fund medical care for people in need. With their innovative platform and a commitment to radical transparency, Watsi’s global network of leading local medical teams provides transformative, high-quality surgery for patients who would otherwise not have access to treatment or would be pushed further into a lifetime of poverty to access care. Through dignified storytelling and amplifying the voices of patients, people around the world can use Watsi to meet and directly support a person’s life-changing treatment, like Ren, a rice farmer and mother in Cambodia whose arm fracture went untreated for six months as she sought the help of traditional healers. Ren’s surgery and post-operative physiotherapy were fully funded by Watsi supporters, restoring the use of her arm and allowing her to return to supporting her family free of pain. The individual connections Watsi creates demonstrate their human-centered approach: to respond to the needs of each patient, inspire more people to join in as part of an innovative global solution, and simplify complex system-level inequities into smaller, solvable pieces.