Home › Our mission

Our mission

To make the cost of basic treatment stop being the reason people die of curable illness, and to prove where every pound went by naming the person it treated.

The mission in one sentence

What we are actually trying to change

There is a category of death that should not exist. Not deaths from diseases we cannot cure, or conditions we cannot reach in time. Deaths from malaria, typhoid and cholera, in towns that have a working clinic with qualified staff, where the only missing component was a few pounds.

That is the specific thing we exist to remove. Not healthcare in general, not poverty in general. The narrow, solvable gap between a person who needs a three pound treatment and a clinic that is already open and able to provide it.

Who we serve

People in Nigeria and Uganda who need everyday medical care and cannot pay for it. Typically they live on a pound or two a day and support several children. They are traders, farmers, shopkeepers and grandmothers. They are not, for the most part, people in permanent crisis. They are people having a bad week in a system with no safety net.

We do not means-test at the stand and we do not ask anybody to prove their poverty. The communities we choose are ones where the need is general.

Our second mission: fixing the trust problem in giving

Most people stop giving because they never find out what happened. Money goes in and an aggregate comes back: your donations helped thousands of people this year. It is almost certainly true and it is almost entirely unsatisfying.

So we set ourselves a harder standard. Every donation must be traceable to one named person and one itemised bill. That constraint shaped every technical decision we made, and it is the reason the charity took longer to build than it needed to.

The principles we will not trade away

1. Treat first, fund second. Patients are treated when they are ill. The bill is settled afterwards. Nobody waits on a stranger to be funded.
2. A human checks every record. The most expensive part of our process, and the part we refuse to automate. See transparency.
3. Dignity is not the price of treatment. No photographs of patients, no surnames, no medical records handed to donors, no obligation to perform gratitude. See patient privacy.
4. Everybody waits their turn. Donors cannot select a patient, because if they could, the photogenic would be funded and the rest would wait forever.
5. Publish the numbers we would rather not. Our donor count is under two hundred. Our model does not cover major surgery. Both are on this website.

What success looks like

Not a larger DOGO. A repeatable one. We can open in a new country in under six weeks because the ID system, the clinic app, the checking and the matching were all built to be lifted rather than rebuilt. The goal is for opening a new region to become routine, so the constraint on how many people get treated is only how many donors we can find.

Half the world does not have free healthcare. We are a very small intervention against that. We would rather be honest about the scale of the gap than pretend we are closing it.

Read next: the programmes we run, why we started, or what we have delivered.

DOGO is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1198719. Registered office: 2 Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, London W12 7FR. Contact info@dogoapp.org. Page reviewed 25 August 2026.