About us
A dialysis chair, kept occupied.
Sonar Bangla Foundation exists to make sure that treatment continues after a family runs out of money. This is how that works, and who it takes.
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The problem
Kidney failure is a financial diagnosis.
Dialysis is needed two or three times a week, indefinitely. The cost pushes families into debt, and then it stops the treatment altogether.
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The arithmetic
Treatment does not taper off. It stops.
There is no reduced course of dialysis for a family that has run out of money. Attendance simply ends, and the clinical consequences follow within weeks.
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2009
Founded to keep treatment going.
The foundation was established to run healthcare facilities that do not turn a patient away when their savings run out.
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The first centre
It started with one room of machines.
NEEDS_REVIEW — the location, year and station count of the first centre are not recorded here. Ask the foundation and replace this panel.
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Today
Twenty-six centres. Twenty-four districts.
Haemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis, including continuous cycling peritoneal dialysis, delivered at subsidised or no cost to patients in need.
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How it is funded
Two ends of a long distance.
Money raised among the diaspora meets a family's own contribution at the centre. Neither covers it alone; together they do.
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Who gives
Mostly people who are not wealthy.
Ticketed evenings, collections among neighbours, standing monthly transfers. The money arrives in small amounts from a lot of people.
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What we run
Five programmes, one purpose.
Dialysis, nursing education, screening and prevention, research and development, and support through transplant.
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Dialysis
The treatment itself.
Four hours in the chair while the machine does what the kidneys stopped doing — repeated two or three times a week, for as long as it is needed.
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Nursing education
A machine is no use without someone trained to run it.
Scholarships and structured training build the specialist nursing workforce that dialysis care depends on.
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Screening
Found early, it is treatable.
Community screening catches kidney disease before it progresses to organ failure, which is the only version of this that is cheap.
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Research
Bioengineering, and what comes after.
Clinical and dialysis bioengineering research, with the long-term goal of a research-based university with a medical school and teaching hospital.
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Transplant
The outcome that ends the cycle.
Supporting patients through transplant is the only part of this work that finishes rather than continues.
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The people
Clinicians, technicians, and the person at the desk.
NEEDS_REVIEW — staff numbers across the centres are not recorded here. Ask the foundation for a current figure.
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Zakah
Directed to patients who qualify.
Zakah funds treatment for patients who cannot pay for it themselves, and is accounted for separately from general giving.
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Adopt a patient
One person's treatment, covered.
A single donor carries the ongoing cost of one patient, whose dialysis continues week after week because of it.
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Scholarships
Put a nurse through training.
Funding a nursing student adds a trained clinician to the country's dialysis workforce, which is the constraint behind every new centre.
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Governance
A 501(c)(3) non-profit.
Registered in the United States, operating across Bangladesh, with offices in Santa Clara and Dhaka.
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Where it goes
Treatment, training, and keeping the doors open.
NEEDS_REVIEW — no published breakdown of programme versus overhead spending has been supplied. Do not state proportions until it has.
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What it takes
The chair has to still be there next week.
A dialysis chair sitting empty is not a saving. It is a person who stopped coming.
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