AMAR International is a charity that has been rebuilding and improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people for the last 25 years.
Founded by the IBBC President, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, AMAR provides comprehensive and sustainable medical and education programmes. With only 10 London-based staff, the majority of the charity’s team – more than 1500 professionals and volunteers – are locally trained and educated in the Middle East.
Following the ISIS invasion of Iraq in 2014, AMAR teams delivered frontline emergency services to many hundreds of thousands of IDPs. Recently they opened a health centre in Mosul for those returning home. The clinic is their fifth in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
Since 2007, AMAR medical staff have carried out 4,035,708 medical consultations, and given almost 700,000 vaccinations.
AMAR also runs unique projects, working with Yazidi women to provide psycho-social support for those that have survived kidnap and enslavement by ISIS, teaching religious tolerance to thousands of children and young adults, conducting programmes to empower women and girls, and an award-winning scheme lecturing on human rights and the rule of law within prisons.
Recently, AMAR, through its annual Windsor Castle conference, has led efforts by senior religious leaders, politicians and academics, to demand global recognition for the ancient Yazidi faith in an effort to prevent further genocides against them.
The charity is partnered by several IBBC members on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects. These include extensive programmes for the Rumaila Operating Organisation (BP) and Shell Iraq.