Nawshad Ahmed

Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF)

The Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF) was founded by a group of child health researchers in Bangladesh in 2007 with a mission to improve child health in Bangladesh and other countries through quality research and education in order to facilitate the decision making on appropriate child health policies. The founder's motivation to form CHRF came from the realization that developing countries like Bangladesh often lack good scientific evidence upon which rational and timely policy decisions can be created, this lack of information often results in poor use of the limited resources available for health. The scarcity of reliable evidence and informed advocacy in turn, discourages government and donors from investing in child health. CHRF has established collaborations with different national and international organizations like USAID, WHO, Johns Hopkins University, ICDDR,B International Vaccine Institute (IVI), Novartis Vaccine Institute for Global Health and others. In addition to research, the foundation is also making efforts to work with other non-profit hospitals to facilitate low-cost diagnostic services for the poor patients with a vision to i) improve child health, and ii) generate evidence for policy decisions. Through an association with the Department of Microbiology at Dhaka Shishu Hospital and a consortium of urban and rural hospitals, CHRF has access to patients, communities and research facilities and is able to inform and improve public health approaches and contribute to scientific and medical knowledge and procedures for application in the South Asia and the broader developing world.