Healthcare shouldn't cost a family its next meal.
Rickshaw Hospital is a mobile clinic bringing free healthcare directly into underserved communities across Karachi — no appointment, no fee, no choosing between a checkup and groceries.
The problem
In Pakistan, healthcare is often out of reach not because it doesn't exist, but because it's unaffordable for the people who need it most. For low-income families, a single visit to the doctor can mean choosing between a checkup and that week's groceries. Transport to and from a hospital costs money. The consultation itself costs money. And if medicine is prescribed, that's another cost stacked on top — one that often gets skipped entirely. For families living paycheck to paycheck, healthcare isn't treated as a right; it's treated as a luxury they can't afford to prioritize.
The consequence
The result is that treatable, everyday illnesses go unaddressed for months. Children grow up with untreated infections. Parents ignore symptoms until they become emergencies. It isn't that people don't care about their health — it's that the system asks them to pay too much, too often, just to be seen.
We saw this firsthand: a mother at one of our camps had a son who'd had stomach pain for months. She'd never brought him in, because a checkup meant choosing between the appointment and that week's groceries. When we finally examined him, we found he had stomach worms — a condition that's simple and inexpensive to treat, but one that had gone untreated for months simply because his family couldn't afford the visit.
Our response
That's why we started Rickshaw Hospital — a mobile clinic that brings free healthcare directly into underserved communities across Karachi, instead of asking people to find their way to it. We remove the transport cost by coming to them. We remove the consultation cost by making it free. And we remove the medicine cost by dispensing it on the spot, at no charge. Our goal is simple: no family should have to choose between their health and their next meal.
In our own words
We noticed how big the gaps in healthcare access really were. Transport costs, consultation fees, and medicine costs meant that so many parents simply couldn't bring their children in for treatment, even when something was clearly wrong. Seeing that over and over, we decided to start something that gave people these services directly, without any of those costs standing in the way.