Welcome to Cleft Pakistan!

What is Cleft Pakistan?

Cleft Pakistan is a cooperation of German and Pakistani NGOs. Our goal is to give all Pakistanis suffering from cleft lip and palate, a common birth defect, free access to the best possible treatment for their condition. We collect donations and use them to fund surgeries performed by our Pakistani partner surgeons at hospitals throughout the country and other cleft treatment performed in Karachi in the province of Sindh.

The goal of Cleft Pakistan is to provide optimal treatment to all citizens of Pakistan afflicted by cleft. Cleft Pakistan was initiated in April 2016 by the German Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Deutsche Cleft Kinderhilfe e.V. (DCKH) and the Pakistani NGO Al Mustafa Welfare Society (AMWS). In 2021-2023, additional funding was secured from the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which was used to build an interdisciplinary cleft treatment center offering additional therapies to patients. In the beginning of 2024, the NGO Muskurahat Foundation Pakistan Trust joined Cleft Pakistan.

Cleft Pakistan organizes, finances, and performs treatment of poor patients suffering from cleft, furthers academic research on cleft and its clinical treatment, and provides training of local medical personnel and public education and awareness efforts.

The Cleft Pakistan Pakistani partners provide their services in Karachi and on treatment camps in cities in the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. Camps are offered eight to nine times a year.

In 2023 and 2022, our Cleft Pakistan team provided around 1,300 cleft surgeries each year, after 1,003 surgeries in 2021. Additionally, thousands of ENT and orthodontics consultations, speech and psychological therapy sessions, and nasoalveolar molding (NAM) therapies were provided.”



Motivated Team

Our cleft related work in Pakistan is executed by a team consisting of pediatricians, orthodontists, speech language pathologists, and surgeons. The team is led by the highly experienced plastic surgeon Prof. Muhammad Ashraf Ganatra and every member of the team is working under his guidance.

Please find more information about our services here.



Would you like to know more?

Find out more about the Cleft Pakistan partners at their respective websites.