Powerful Relief

What would you do with a billion dollars? The UAE Red Crescent Authority is using it to save the lives of thousands, perhaps millions, of people

Dr. Saleh Moussa Al Taee, Secretary General, UAE Red Crescent Authority

While the UAE may be a small country, its Red Crescent Authority is larger than most other Red Crescents or Red Crosses.

“Our organisation is the second largest and most powerful in Asia,” says Dr. Saleh Moussa Al Taee, Secretary General of the UAE Red Crescent Authority (RCA), referring to the 185 other members of the Federation of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). “We are also number four in the world, in terms of the amount of relief and emergency support we supply.”

The UAE RCA has activities in 135 countries and larger projects in 35 countries. “Our organisation not only does relief action,” explains Al Taee, “we also build cities and hospitals, amongst other things.” He estimates that the charity has touched the lives of “millions”.

Al Taee says the RCA’s biggest projects are in Palestine, for example, for the redevelopment of Jenin. “We built up the city completely, including 230 flats for the needy, as well as schools, hospitals and mosques.”

They also developed Sheikh Zayed City in the Gaza Strip. “Everyone is talking about problems in Gaza, but we have many projects there,” says Al Taee. “We have two hospitals, one city and we have a small, small clinic.”

But the Red Crescent helps more than Muslims. “We are not looking at the colour or religion or geographic area of the people we help,” he says. “For example, following the South Asian Tsunami, we worked in Phuket, Thailand. They are not Muslims, yet we built and bought many things for them.” He says they have even built Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka.

While most of the UAE RCA’s efforts have focused outside the UAE, Al Taee says they plan to start looking inwards as well. They will, for example, start offering their mobile open heart surgery team free of charge and work to increase health awareness in the country.

He says money for charity flows quite freely in the prosperous UAE. “We are lucky that our Chairman, His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, pays from his pocket. And his mother, Her Highness Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak is also with us.”

In fact, between 2002 and 2007 donations from wealthy individuals and the UAE government allowed the UAE RCA to spend over US$1 billion outside the country.

“You can buy five fighting planes with this money,” says Al Taee. “But we are saving thousands of people with it.”