About Maisha

Maisha is a collection of life-saving messages designed to travel through low-infrastructure channels: paper, voice, SMS, and radio. The name comes from the Swahili word for "life."

Philosophy

People die from problems that have known solutions. Sometimes the solution is simple: give fluids during diarrhea, apply pressure to stop bleeding, turn an unconscious person on their side. But if this knowledge does not reach people at the right moment, it cannot help.

Maisha exists to close this gap. Not by building systems or training professionals, but by putting essential knowledge where people already are, in forms they already use.

Why lightweight

Large organizations face constraints. They need funding, reporting, coordination. They move slowly and must often focus on scale and metrics.

Maisha takes a different approach. The messages are free. There is no registration, no membership, no reporting. Anyone can print a message and post it. Anyone can send a message to their community. The work happens at the edges, through individual actions.

This keeps Maisha fast, flexible, and hard to stop. It does not depend on any single organization, funding source, or technology platform.

Usefulness over coverage

Maisha does not aim to reach everyone. It aims to be useful where it is used.

A message that helps one community is more valuable than a campaign that reaches millions but changes no behavior. We focus on whether messages actually help people, not on how many people see them.

This also means accepting limits. Some places do not need Maisha. Some contexts require more nuanced guidance than a short message can provide. We would rather be genuinely useful in some places than superficially present everywhere.

Not a replacement

Maisha does not try to replace health systems, medical professionals, or emergency services. Where these exist and function, they provide better care than any printed message can.

Maisha is for the gaps: the time before help arrives, the places where help is far away, the situations where people must act on their own. It works alongside other systems, not instead of them.

Where strong health systems exist, follow their guidance. Maisha is not meant to override local medical advice or emergency protocols.

Honesty about limits

A short message cannot cover every situation. It cannot account for every local context, every individual condition, every possible complication. Maisha messages are starting points, not complete instructions.

We try to be honest about this. Messages are written to be safe within their limits. When a situation requires professional help, messages say so. When a message might not apply in certain contexts, we acknowledge it.

We believe people deserve straightforward information about what we can and cannot offer.

Open to all

Maisha messages are free to use, share, print, and translate. There is no copyright restriction on sharing them. They belong to whoever finds them useful.

If you want to help, visit the Contribute page. If you simply want to share a message with someone who needs it, that is contribution enough.