Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Edhi Foundation
The Edhi Foundation is a Pakistani charity that runs the country's largest network of ambulances and shelters, funded mostly by small donations from ordinary people.
The Edhi Foundation is Pakistan's best-known charity. It runs the country's largest ambulance service — hundreds of vehicles that race to accidents and emergencies, often before anyone else arrives. It also runs homes for orphans, abandoned babies, the elderly, and the mentally ill, plus free clinics, blood banks, and morgues. If you fall off a motorcycle in Karachi, the odds are good that an Edhi ambulance shows up.
The money to pay for all this comes almost entirely from ordinary people. The foundation famously refuses government money and foreign aid, because its founder believed that taking such money would come with strings attached and create dependence. Instead it depends on a huge base of small donors — shopkeepers dropping coins into collection boxes, families giving zakat, businesspeople writing checks. Its annual budget runs into the billions of rupees, and the vast majority of it is spent directly on services rather than on fundraising or administration. The man behind it, Abdul Sattar Edhi, started with a single free dispensary in Karachi in 1951 and built the whole thing from there, mostly with a handcart ambulance and relentless persistence. His wife Bilquis ran the women's side of the operations, and their children took over after his death in 2016. The organization is unusual in that it keeps almost no money in reserve and spends what it gets, and it is known for helping anyone regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics — a striking stance in a country where sectarian divides run deep. It has rescued thousands of abandoned babies through its jhoola program, where people can leave an infant in a cradle outside an Edhi center with no questions asked.
Its biggest strength is trust. People give to Edhi because they believe the money actually reaches the poor, and the foundation's reputation for frugality and transparency is its real currency. It faces no real rival in the emergency and welfare space, though it has sometimes been pressured by governments and critics over its refusal to take state funds. That independence is the whole point: the donation box buys freedom as much as it buys ambulances.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026