Home › Our story
Our story
DOGO exists because of one phone call during the pandemic, and one answer nobody expected.
The call
DOGO was founded by Sal Mohammed, who previously ran technology partnerships for the UK and Ireland at Google. In 2022 he was in London, speaking to family and to his Nigerian house teacher in northern Nigeria, asking what everybody was asking everybody in those days: how is COVID over there?
"Oh, COVID? It is cholera here."
People were dying of cholera. Not historically. Right then. He said what most people would say. Is cholera not treatable?
"Yes. It is treatable. But it costs money."
How much money?
"Three to five pounds."
And then the sentence that built a charity:
"A girl just nine years old, in the street behind me, died. Because nobody could afford the treatment."
The arithmetic nobody should have to do
People often ask, sincerely, how a parent could fail to find three pounds for a dying child. It is worth answering that properly, because the answer is the whole point.
You are living on a pound or two a day. You have five or six children. One of them becomes ill and the treatment costs three pounds. That is not a small bill. That is this week's food for everybody else in the house. The choice is not whether you love your child. The choice is which of your children you fail.
What we built, and why we built it that way
We could have raised money and posted it somewhere. Instead we spent the time building infrastructure, for three reasons that have shaped everything since.
- Secure with people's data from day one. We are handling the medical records of people who have very little power. Getting that wrong would be unforgivable.
- Easy to lift and drop into a new country. A model that only works in one place is a project, not a solution.
- Communicative above all. A donor should never be left wondering where their money went. That is why we tell you the name.
The number that has not changed
The treatment that started all of this cost three to five pounds. Today, a typical DOGO treatment in Nigeria still costs about £3. The number that stopped our founder in his tracks is the same number the entire charity now runs on.
Our first patient match on record is April 2022. Since then we have delivered 1,980 treatments.
Read next: how it works, or what we have done since.
Give someone a treatment
Set up a £5 monthly donation and we will show you exactly who it treated. In Nigeria, £5 covers one person's entire treatment, usually with change.
Three ways to give, all working right now:
- Donate on WhatsApp. The quickest route. Message us and we will set it up inside the chat. No app to install, no forms, no password.
- Dogo Health on the App Store, or on Google Play. Set your amount once and you are matched with a new person automatically each month.
Monthly from £5, one-off from £10. Cancel any time from the app. Questions first? Write to info@dogoapp.org.