In Pakistan, a plan to prevent hundreds of child deaths each day
2026 Skoll Award winner ChildLife Foundation brings high-quality emergency care to government hospitals and uses telemedicine to reach the most rural areas.
In Washuk, a remote town in the heart of Pakistan’s Balochistan desert, a baby’s life was saved when a ChildLife paediatrician guided a local doctor through oxygen therapy and resuscitation via video call.
“A thousand children below the age of five are dying every day, more than [the number of deaths from] heart disease, stroke and cancer combined,” says Ahson Rabbani, the CEO of ChildLife Foundation, a non-profit that runs free emergency rooms (ERs) for children across Pakistan, as well as a telemedicine network connecting rural hospitals to expert paediatricians. “When you save a child, it has the biggest impact. You’re giving them 70 years of life.”
In Pakistan, the public healthcare system is creaky. The country spends only 0.4% of GDP on healthcare, far below the 6% the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends for low-income countries. And although treatment in public hospitals is free, shortages of doctors and nurses in specialties such as paediatrics, particularly in rural areas, make it hard to access good care. According to UNICEF, almost one in 17 children in Pakistan do not live to see their fifth birthday. ChildLife’s belief is that, with better emergency care, as many as half of these deaths could be prevented.
ChildLife works within 14 public hospitals across Pakistan, taking over management of their children’s ERs and upgrading them with new training, technology and systems. Through its telemedicine network, it connects a further 300 hospitals to ChildLife doctors, enabling specialists to treat rural patients without anyone having to travel.
“[ChildLife has] 450 doctors who can debate and discuss [medical] protocols,” says Mr Rabbani, who has a business doctorate, rather than a medical one. “My job is to make their lives easier, to focus on processes and systems, and the deployment of technology that helps us scale.”
“When you save a child, it has the biggest impact. You’re giving them 70 years of life.”
Ahson Rabbani
Its model is working. A Stanford University study found that in 2013, the year Mr Rabbani joined ChildLife, paediatric mortality rates in Pakistan’s ERs stood at 12.7%. A 2025 follow-up found that ChildLife had improved outcomes tenfold, reporting a 1.2% mortality rate for critically ill children, slightly better than the 1.4% at Pakistan’s top private hospitals.
Mr Rabbani notes that 90% of children are now within reach of ChildLife’s services, either through its telemedicine network or by visiting one of its ERs. Economies of scale mean that it costs just US$7 for ChildLife to treat a child, which is covered through a combination of grants and government partnerships, and so parents pay nothing. The same visit to a privately run ER would cost parents US$100.
“You have to have an asset-light [model],” explains Mr Rabbani. “We use existing infrastructure, so the cost barriers are low. Then telemedicine is a force multiplier. If one paediatrician can look at multiple sites, it lowers the cost.”
The team also uses data to help hospitals improve. If one hospital regularly calls on telemedicine specialists to treat pneumonia, for example, ChildLife can provide targeted feedback on where it needs to build capacity. In 2024, data insights such as these led Lahore’s Mayo Hospital to extend opening hours from 2pm to 8pm, allowing the hospital to treat an extra 100 patients per day.
The hope is that the model can be replicated elsewhere. “In Africa, there are 1,000 different dialects, but medical education happens in English and French,” Mr Rabbani says. Perhaps, then, a Pakistan-based doctor could provide telemedicine services to English-speaking colleagues in Africa.
The ambition was not always so large-scale. ChildLife launched in Karachi in 2010, after floods revealed how rundown the city’s Civil Hospital had become. By 2016, ChildLife had secured partnerships with two more Karachi hospitals, and the team realised that it was close to providing coverage for every child in the city. “It was a watershed moment,” says Mr Rabbani. “The vision became ‘let’s make this city with no child more than 30 minutes away from 24/7 quality care’. And once you do a city, you can do a province, and then you can do a nation.”
The expansion of ChildLife’s telemedicine and ER network since 2010 has seen more than 10m children treated in more than 300 public district hospitals in Pakistan, saving their families an average of US$140-280 on travel and hospital costs. “It gives you so much confidence. What you need is the belief that it can be done.”