Smile Asia 3.27

Every three minutes a child is born with cleft — often unable to eat, speak, socialize or smile. In some places these children are shunned and rejected. And in too many cases, their parents can’t afford the surgeries they need to live a normal life.

That’s where Smile Asia comes in, providing much needed medical services.

Smile Asia is a global alliance of independent charities working together to treat facial deformities like cleft lip and cleft palate. We aim to raise standards of medical care by creating opportunities of collaborative learning and exchange of best practices.

We deliver free surgical care through medical missions and outreach centres. These initiatives build trust and bridge cultures among different communities. Together with a raised level of medical care, a groundwork is laid for self-sufficiency across many impoverished regions.

OUR VISION
Raise standards of medical care by creating opportunities of collaborative learning through the delivery of free surgery to children with facial deformities.

OUR MISSION
Initiate platforms of learning through medical volunteering
Deliver free surgical care to children with facial deformities
Establish training & education programmes for volunteers
Build a knowledge depository with an open-source model
Instil a sense of volunteerism in the community


While healthcare in Asia has advanced immensely over the past few decades, we still consistently see great disparities in healthcare delivery and availability. Annually, over 100,000 children in Asia are born with cleft lip or cleft palate and do not have proper access to treatment that will dramatically change their lives.

We, the founding charities of Smile Asia®, specialise in the delivery of care to children with cleft lip, cleft palate and other facial deformities. We chose our own unique names to illustrate our independence and highlight our individuality. While we are individual charities, we continue to share a unified vision for the future.

Delivering care to these patients through multi-country partnerships and locally-led directives are the way of the future. We want our approach to reflect that. At the same time, we remain focused on helping children. We have configured our programmes so that we can better serve them. We also seek to create sustainable programmes that empower local communities while respecting local country processes. Through multi-agency and multi-country collaborations, we look forward to a cleft-free Asia.

Collectively, we remain committed to providing safe surgeries and high quality care through medical missions and outreach centres. We teamed up with esteemed medical professionals to have universal standards of care. Under these standards, every patient is treated with quality materials by highly trained and qualified doctors and nurses. We also created training programmes and enabled collaboration for long-term sustainability of our programmes.

Together, we have activities across 20 countries and have delivered over 60,000 surgeries. We would not have been able to do this without the continued support and contribution of our dedicated volunteers, partners, and donors.