Our Story | Ethiopian Orphan Health Foundation

2005: First trip to Gondar

Rishi Mediratta arrived in Gondar in the summer of 2005, between his sophomore and junior years at Johns Hopkins. He had come to do community-based fieldwork in public health. He stayed in touch with the families he met long after the summer ended.

2008: The foundation begins

By the time Rishi graduated from Johns Hopkins, the informal partnerships he had built had outgrown his backpack. With local partners, he formalized the Ethiopian Orphan Health Foundation to provide community-based health care and education to 91 orphans near Gondar.

“Throughout college and during my first gap year before medical school, I founded the Ethiopian Orphan Health Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provided community-based health care and education to 91 orphans near Gondar, Ethiopia.” Rishi Mediratta

2008 to 2015: Marshall Scholar, then MD

Rishi went on to become a British Marshall Scholar, earning graduate degrees in medical anthropology and public health in London. He then returned to the United States for medical school at Stanford. Through all of it, the foundation kept running.

2015 to Today: A research home in Gondar

As a pediatrician and researcher, Rishi’s work has become increasingly intertwined with the foundation. His research at the University of Gondar Hospital NICU, on neonatal mortality prediction and remote resuscitation training, is rooted in the same community the foundation serves.

Twenty years on

The relationships built in 2005 are still alive in 2026. Today the foundation continues to train health practitioners to care for vulnerable children in Ethiopia. In parallel, Dr. Mediratta continues to conduct research to improve child health outcomes across the country.

About the mark. Two cupped hands form a heart, holding a small radiant sun above. The hands read as caregivers holding a child. The sun references the gold sunburst on Ethiopia’s flag, and the outer ring nods to the Meskel cross of Ethiopian Orthodox tradition.

The work the foundation makes possible.

Two decades of relationships in Gondar now power a research program focused on reducing neonatal mortality and strengthening child health systems across Ethiopia.

The Neonatal Mortality Score

As a pediatrics resident, Dr. Mediratta derived and validated a neonatal mortality prediction score that does not rely on laboratory information. His team collected data from over 1,000 neonates at the University of Gondar Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The resulting Neonatal Mortality Score predicts in-hospital neonatal mortality with excellent discrimination and calibration using four parameters: mental status, level of respiratory distress, birth weight, and gestational age.

Published in: BMC Pediatrics (2020). PLOS ONE (2022).

External validation across Ethiopia

Dr. Mediratta is currently validating the Neonatal Mortality Score at a second site in Ethiopia and collaborating with a pediatrician in London to validate the Score in another country. Over the past two years he collected data from more than 2,000 neonates at the St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Addis Ababa for external validation.

Quality improvement in Gondar

Building on the Score, Dr. Mediratta is designing a quality improvement program in Gondar to improve the triage of neonates and communication among frontline providers, so the highest-risk newborns are identified and escalated faster.

Training community health workers

With a grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics’ I-CATCH program, Dr. Mediratta led a video-based curriculum that helped train 200 nurses, midwives, and community health workers in Gondar on neonatal danger signs. Knowledge gains were sustained six months after the curriculum.

After Dr. Mediratta presented the evaluation, the Ethiopian Ministry of Health incorporated several of the neonatal health videos into the flagship Health Extension Worker refresher training, which reaches over 40,000 Health Extension Workers nationwide.

Remote neonatal resuscitation training

Dr. Mediratta led a noninferiority randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia comparing remote versus in-person pre-service neonatal resuscitation training, with direct implications for scaling provider education in geographically dispersed health systems.

Published in: Resuscitation (2025).

Acute diarrhoea in North Gondar

An early study from Dr. Mediratta’s undergraduate fieldwork: a prospective, matched case-control study conducted at the University of Gondar Referral and Teaching Hospital that interviewed mothers of 440 children to identify the risk factors and case management practices shaping outcomes in northern Ethiopia.

Published in: Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (2010).

From a college fieldwork trip to an impactful nonprofit.