Continuing his mission — a long-term hospital in Sandiara, providing medical and surgical care, and in time a place where Senegalese clinicians train alongside visiting doctors.
In 2017, during a medical mission to the leprosy village of Kalom, Senegal, Dr. Idrissa Faye — a beloved member of the Africa Cries Out medical team — passed away suddenly while serving the people he loved.
“On the way to the leprosy village, he traveled with us. On the way back, he was lying in a box.”
His passing shook us deeply — but it also ignited a mission. From that day, we made a promise: We will continue his work. We will honor his legacy. We will build a hospital in his name.
Africa Cries Out is developing a permanent medical home so that emergency care, surgery, safe childbirth, and everyday healing are no longer hours away. It carries forward the legacy of a beloved physician who gave his life in service.
Since 2013 ACO has carried medicine into dozens of villages with little or no healthcare of their own, and the base clinic near Dakar is open every week of the year. What none of it can do is send a patient onward. There is no operating theatre of our own — surgery happens in rooms borrowed from other hospitals, when they are free and only while the team is in the country. There is no one to hand a patient with high blood pressure or diabetes to in the months after the team flies home. A woman who needs a caesarean in June is driven hours to find one. What these communities lack is not another visit; it is a system that stays.
Five things make that possible.
The Dr. Idrissa Faye Memorial Hospital carries a particular commitment to underserved and economically vulnerable patients. Through charitable support, partnerships and a sustainable payment model, ACO works so that financial hardship does not become an insurmountable barrier to medically necessary care.
Our commitment: no one should be denied essential care simply because they are poor.
ACO’s outreach finds patients in communities across Senegal, and some of them need far more than an outreach visit can give. The hospital makes a path where there was a dead end:
The care chain — what happens to a patient
The two steps in red are the hospital’s part of the line. Today ACO can do neither: there is no operating theatre, and surgery waits for a borrowed room and a visiting team. Everything before and after happens where the patient lives.
Instead of an isolated episode of care, ACO can accompany a patient the whole way — and hand them back to their own village rather than to nobody. Note where the hospital sits in that line: near the end, and not at it. The hospital is the centre; the villages are the communities we are here to serve.
Our goal: find the patient, understand the need, provide the treatment, and stay with them through recovery.
The hospital is staffed and led by Senegalese healthcare professionals who provide care through the whole year. Visiting physicians, surgeons, nurses and specialists work alongside their Senegalese colleagues to widen specialty services, exchange knowledge, and meet needs the local team has identified.
This is not a hospital that depends on occasional foreign medical missions. It is a locally rooted hospital strengthened by global partnership.
Our model: local leadership. Global partnership. Year-round care.
A hospital can be more than a place of healing; it can be a place of learning. ACO has a standing partnership with the Alliance of North American Chinese Physicians (ANACP), a physician organization of more than 1,500 members and an independently accredited provider of Continuing Medical Education through the ACCME. That accreditation is what turns visiting expertise into recognized teaching rather than an informal visit. As the hospital develops, ACO envisions further partnerships with universities, medical schools and residency programs:
These are designed around mutual learning rather than one-way teaching. Senegalese clinicians and communities hold knowledge that visiting students and physicians need to learn from, just as international partnerships bring educational resources and specialty expertise. Reciprocal, locally responsive education has proved more durable than isolated short-term visits.
Our vision: a hospital where caring for patients and educating the next generation happen side by side.
The measure of this hospital is not how many visiting physicians come to Senegal, nor how many operations are performed during a mission week. It is how much lasting healthcare capacity is created in Senegal.
By investing in local healthcare professionals, infrastructure, training, technology, clinical systems and long-term partnerships, ACO helps strengthen the local healthcare community’s ability to care for patients independently. That is consistent with the strongest models of global-health partnership, which emphasize local priorities, shared leadership, reciprocal benefit and capacity building rather than short-term service alone.
The capacity chain — what happens to the system
What ACO wants to bring is not only physicians and medicine but knowledge, skills, technology and training — so that what an international team knows becomes what the local team can do. The aim is not a community that depends on visiting doctors indefinitely. It is a healthcare system that runs itself, trains its own people, manages disease over years rather than days, and keeps reaching the villages that have the least.
Our measure of success: not simply what we do while we are there, but what remains and continues to grow.
This is not simply the building of a hospital. It is the building of a fulcrum — connecting the dozens of villages ACO has already served, and connecting care, medicine, technology, knowledge and the training of people, so that Senegal gradually holds a healthcare system of its own.
The land is bought. We begin with the groundwork that secures the site and brings clean water — then build the outpatient centre, and grow toward a full hospital as approvals and funding allow.
The land is bought — at Mbourokh Toucouleur, about an hour from Dakar. We begin with the simple groundwork, small enough that every gift moves it forward.
A ~2,500 m² centre that can run on its own — the priority departments first.
Inpatient care and advanced services, added once approvals are in place.
The land is bought and the work is ready to begin. Right now every gift goes into the groundwork — the wall that secures the campus and the well that brings clean water. Here is exactly what your generosity builds.
✦ The Wall of Thanks: every $200 metre carries a small plaque with the donor's name — together they ring the whole campus in gratitude.
Prefer to back a young person? Our youth are claiming metres of their own — support a youth fundraiser →
Major naming gifts carry the honoree's name on the building itself — a lasting tribute, distinct from the wall plaques.
Every gift builds this hospital — brick by brick, and life by life.
Every day, families in this region face medical emergencies with nowhere to turn. When you give, you are providing dignity, safety, and life-saving care to people who have been waiting for hope.