Community Health Visits
Trained local health workers visit children where they live, checking on growth, nutrition, and chronic conditions, and connecting families to clinics for anything beyond primary care.
Our Story
From a college fieldwork trip to an impactful nonprofit.
The Ethiopian Orphan Health Foundation was founded by Rishi Mediratta, then a Johns Hopkins undergraduate in Public Health, today a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford. Rishi first traveled to Ethiopia in 2005, and what began as a community-based research project grew, over college and a gap year, into a nonprofit serving 91 orphans near Gondar.
The foundation has been shaped from day one by the people of Gondar. Local caregivers, teachers, and clinicians decide what the children need most; the foundation’s role is to make sure those needs are met.
Today the foundation continues to train health practitioners to care for vulnerable children in Ethiopia. In parallel, Dr. Mediratta continues to conduct research at the University of Gondar to improve child health outcomes, with the foundation and its research arm informing one another year after year.
“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, Founder
