Welcome to Cleft Pakistan!

What is Cleft Pakistan?

Welcome to Cleft Pakistan!

The German Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Deutsche Cleft Kinderhilfe e.V. has been supporting the care for underprivileged patients with cleft lip and palate in Pakistan since 2016.

Deutsche Cleft Kinderhilfe and Pakistani NGOs cooperate under the joint initiative Cleft Pakistan, which was initiated in 2016 by Deutsche Cleft Kinderhilfe e.V. and the Karachi based NGO Al Mustafa Welfare Society. The goal of Cleft Pakistan 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.

The Cleft Pakistan team provided some 1,300 cleft surgeries each year in 2022 and 2023. Additionally, thousands of ENT and orthodontics consultations, speech and psychological therapy sessions, and nasoalveolar molding (NAM) therapies were provided. Treatment of cleft lip and palate is executed by a Pakistani team consisting of surgeons, pediatricians, orthodontists and speech language pathologists. Cleft Pakistan is led by the highly experienced plastic surgeon Prof. Muhammad Ashraf Ganatra. We collect donations and use them to fund surgeries and other kinds of cleft treatment performed in the provinces of Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In 2021-2023, Deutsche Cleft Kinderhilfe cooperated with the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in order to strengthen the interdisciplinary cleft treatment by offering additional therapies to cleft patients. In 2024, the NGOs Muskurahat Foundation Pakistan Trust, Karachi, and Craniofascial Cleft Welfare Association, Lahore, with its cleft surgeon Dr. Waseem Humayoun and his team, joined Cleft Pakistan.

Please find more information about the services provided under Cleft Pakistan on our services page here.



Would you like to know more?

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



Arrange your cleft surgery now!

You can find the contact information for our two cleft surgery teams, based in Karachi and Lahore, on this page of our site: https://www.cleftpakistan.org/patient-information/service-offered.html.

Your surgery is funded by our donors and will be free of charge to you.