Mr.Abdul Sattar Edhi was born in Bantwa, in India on 28 February 1928 and joined his father's clothing business after 1947 when Indio was partitioned, and the family moved to Karachi. He left the family business and with a few friends, opened a one - room community dispensary in the old Karachi's Mithada area. In 1954 he acquired his first ambulance, a Hillman car. He would go around the city looking for people needing transportation to hospitals. With this humble beginning he has managed to create an organisation that has thousands of voluntary workers giving of their time for the sake of others. He runs the organisation with the help of his wife Bilquees.

The foundation runs 300 emergency centres all over Pakistan, which are open round the clock to take care of major accident victims. There is a fleet of 600 ambulances and 3 air ambulances.

 

The foundation runs homes for orphans, primary and secondary schools, homes for the handicapped, abandoned infants and runaway children, drug addicts, abused women, maternity and family planning centres, training centres for nursing, blood bank, TB sanitarium and a cancer hospital.

It is a large welfare organisational network and runs entirely on private donations from Pakistan and other countries. He has started Edhi's 50 KM project, which is a multipurpose project to provide basic health facilities to the rural and urban population and to save lives on roads and highways all over Pakistan. At every 300 km, a 50 bed hospital will be built for the treatment of poor patients and the injured from road traffic accidents, to treat complicated deliveries and to train females of the particular area as nurses and midwives. The estimated cost of building 125 centers is 195 million rupees, the cost of constructing of 21 50-bedded hospitals is about 105 million rupees and running expenditure is 150 million rupees per annum.  

 

There are Edhi centres in 13 countries. Abdul Sattar Edhi is a philanthropist, humanitarian and a visionary. His story is of a lifetime of hard work dedicated to Pakistan's suffering millions. Mr. Edhi is truly worthy of being awarded the Hamdan Award for Volunteers in Humanitarian Medical Services.