How a Mobile Clinic Fuel gift reaches a remote village
Follow a single £25 gift from the Charity Shop checkout to a Land Cruiser turning off the tarmac in northern Pakistan.
Of all the gifts in the Charity Shop, "Mobile Clinic Fuel" is the one people ask about most. It sounds prosaic. Diesel. So this piece traces what actually happens to one of those gifts.
It begins, as most do, on a phone in the UK. A donor selects "Mobile Clinic Fuel" for £25, adds a personal note for a friend's birthday, and pays through Donorbox. The transaction settles into our charity account within a couple of working days.
Once a week, our operations team batches up Mobile Clinic gifts and confirms allocations against a rolling forecast from the field. The forecast is built from the partner clinics that ran the previous month — how far they drove, what they spent on fuel, how many vehicles were in service, what they expect for the coming weeks. If a region is overfunded, we redirect inside the same programme. If a region is short, we top it up.
Funds are then released to the partner organisation that runs the mobile clinic in question. Most of our partners are local NGOs registered in their own country, with their own audited accounts. A small share of the gift covers the cost of moving the money — international banking is not free — and we publish that share rather than hide it.
In country, the partner converts the funds at local rates and tops up the fuel account for their fleet. A typical mobile clinic Land Cruiser will cover between forty and a hundred kilometres on a clinic day, depending on the route, and will burn somewhere between ten and twenty litres of diesel doing it. £25 of fuel does not, on its own, run a clinic for a week. It contributes to a week of clinics, alongside the other gifts pooled with it.
On the morning of the clinic day, a clinician, a community health worker and sometimes a midwife load the vehicle with a basic pharmacy, vaccines in a cool-box, and the day's records. They leave before sunrise to make the most of the daylight. The road is the easy part — the hard part is the last twenty minutes off the tarmac, where the diesel really matters.
By late afternoon, somewhere between forty and a hundred patients have been seen, several have been referred onward, and the team is heading back. Your gift is now a fuel receipt in a logbook that the partner will reconcile with us at the end of the month.
That is the whole journey. We will publish the photos and the route maps as the programme matures.
By World Aid Network