Throughout his entire career, Dr. Dilan Ellegala has been dedicated to embracing global health. Ellegala’s nonprofit, the Madaktari Foundation, actively works to improve healthcare around the world by facilitating global medical education efforts.
Madaktari Foundation
The Madaktari Foundation (also known as Madaktari Africa) was founded by Dr. Dilan Ellegala in 2006. While on a medical sabbatical in Haydom, Tanzania, Ellegala recognized an unmet need for medical education in rural areas of the African continent. During his time volunteering his medical expertise and performing surgical procedures, he noticed that the efforts of visiting doctors simply did not address the health challenges faced by Africans in the long term.
Limited access to education and information on medical procedures and health care pose incredible challenges in the rural parts of African countries. This greatly impacts quality of life, as patients are unable to receive lifesaving treatment due to a lack of resources. In an effort to combat this challenge, Dr. Ellegala developed the Madaktari Foundation, which provides African medical professionals with critical and intensive neurosurgical training. In effect, this offers their patients incredible options that are truly improving their health and overall quality of life!
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa
Published by Beacon Press in 2017, Tony Bartelme’s A Surgeon in the Village details Dilan Ellegala’s journey in revolutionizing and reshaping health care within Africa. The book dives deep into Ellegala’s realization that the country of Tanzania had only three brain surgeons — despite its population of more than forty-two million people. A story of global health and medical education, Bartelme retells Ellegala’s incredible experience in teaching brain surgery and other neurosurgical procedures to medical professionals in rural Africa. What’s more, A Surgeon in the Village outlines how Ellegala effectively impacted African health care in a major way — forever.