HPA brife
Health Poverty Action was founded in 1984, and is an international NGO working on health and its social determinants with headquarters in London.Health Poverty Action has been working to strengthen poor and marginalised people in their struggle for health for over 30 years. We work with some of the poorest and most marginalized communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, often in very difficult environments and fragile states. HPA works to enable these communities to achieve both immediate and long-term improvements to their health, promoting the realization of Millennium Development Goals “everybody has access to primary health care service”.

Until 2010 Health Poverty Action was called Health Unlimited. Today we work in 14 countries, benefiting many millions of people each year.  We employ approaching 500 staff overseas, mostly recruited from the populations they serve, and around 25people work in our London-based head office.Over the years, Health Poverty Action has developed close relationships with marginalised communities who have learnt through bitter experience to trust few others.  They might be marginalised because of ethnicity, culture, gender, geography, politics, economics – or even all of these.  We are passionate about the work we do, and know that for individual mothers, fathers, friends and children, it can mean the difference between grief and loss, or lives spent sharing, experiencing and growing old together.  

Health Poverty Action’s East Asia Programme (hereafter names EAPO) was launched in 1993 when it started a primary health care project covering 8 provinces in Eastern China. One year later EAPO started an emergency project in Kachin State Special Region Two of Burma which then extended to a long term primary health care project. Over the past 22 years, EAPO has expanded its programme from Kachin State Special Region Two to all other special regions of Burma bordering with China, namely Shan State Special Region Two (2001), Shan State Special Region Four (2006), Shan State Special Region One (2007) and Kachin State Special Region One (2010) and North Shan State Kokang. During the same period, EAPO also implemented a MCH and Infectious Diseases Control Project in neighbouring Yunnan Province of China which continued for 10 years until 2006. In 2006, Health Poverty Action relocated its East Asia Programme Office from the eastern city of Hanzhou to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, in order to provide better oversight and support to its growing programme on the China-Burma border. 

Health Poverty Action was registered with the Yunnan Provincial Civil Affairs Department of China in 2010. Health Poverty Action now employs 150 staff in its East Asia Programme. Based in the regional East Asia Programme Office in Kunming, 16 staffs provide overall management, technical, liaison, financial and logistics support to the field.  90% of these staffs works in the field offices based in the special regions of Burma. This Regional Office has three function units: Programme Support and Development, Finance and Assets Management and Institutional Development. To meet the needs of the project, Health Poverty Action has established an office in Yangon in March 2013.HPA obtained a Memorandum of Understanding, signed with Burma’s Ministry of Health and Ministry of Home Affairs in May 2013, and was registered in Burma in 2012.