OUR WORK > Bangladesh 

Surgeries and comprehensive care urgently needed

We have been treating cleft children for more than 10 years. With our five highly qualified and experienced head surgeons and their teams we perform up to 1.500 surgeries per year. Our long-term goal is to slowly treat the untreated older cleft patients (we assume a backlog of 100.000 such cases in Bangladesh) and also to treat all newborn cleft children as early as possible (we assume that about 5.000 cleft children are born every year in Bangladesh).

The next step forward

Our next goal is to open a comprehensive cleft care (CCC) center in Bangladesh. All our surgeons are looking forward to improve the current situation, where almost all patients and their families from the poorer parts of the population cannot get any cleft treatment beyond the basic surgery. In a CCC program the surgery is only the first step in a long multidisciplinary treatment process to give the patients the best possible functionality and quality of life.

As a first step we will add orthodontic treatment and speech therapy treatment to our services, in addition to our already ongoing education and awareness work on the treatability of cleft. This kind of educational work is important, since many of the poor in Bangladesh do not know that cleft can be treated.

Join us!

Please join us and help us offer even better treatment in Bangladesh. The Cleft Group is one of the main international organizations promoting and delivering comprehensive cleft care in the country. Cleft children need long-term support, with further treatments often being necessary until they grow up. Thus we are looking for long-term sponsorships to take decisive steps forward.



Learn more

To learn more about our work in Bangladesh please visit our dedicated country website CleftBangladesh.org