Waleed Shawky is a pharmacist who founded Medicine for All in order to help narrow the gap between the misuse of medicine and the uninsured patients through a unique system of collecting, sorting and redistributing medicine for poor and needy patients in non-urban areas.

Shawky’s idea started through his work at his pharmacy, when customers started giving him the extra medicine they had to be redistributed to poor and needy patients. One night, he noticed there were more than 100 bags of unused medicine in a room in one of the mosques. This led him to start an initiative for affordable medicine for all uninsured and disadvantaged individuals.

The NGO proved its success, when it established the first charity pharmacy in the faculty of pharmacy at Cairo University in 2010 and in Ain Shams University in 2012, as the first educational pharmacy to help pharmacy students to act in well-organized charity work and good pharmacy practice. It also received requests for medicines that could not be found in any pharmacy, but were at the organization. The initiative has benefited 600 people in 2006, and 3,000 in 2015, who otherwise would not have had access to the medication they needed. The value of the medicine collected was worth 2,000 LE monthly in 2006 and 50,000 LE in 2015. In addition to this, it is estimated that Shawky’s work helps serve most the vulnerable in the community, but also the pharmacies and in doing so, it cultivates a spirit of volunteerism and community cohesiveness.