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The Couple Who Cared for a Nation

How Bilquis Edhi and her husband Abdul Sattar built a healthcare system for Pakistan.

Bilquis Edhi and her husband Abdul Sattar Edhi have built up and run Pakistan's most impressive social enterprise. The Edhi Foundation started off with a tiny dispensary in a Karachi slum but now provides health care to millions of people across Pakistan. They run everything from orphanages, clinics and maternity homes to centres for the mentally ill and disabled, mortuaries, soup kitchens and schools. They also have one of the world's biggest fleets of ambulances. The couple themselves continued to live a frugal life in the small flat over the original dispensary. Earlier this year, Abdul Sattar died at the age of 88. Bilquis Edhi tells Matthew Bannister how she met her husband when she was working as a nurse.

Irina Kolesnikova has been Prima Ballerina with the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre in Russia for the last fifteen years. She's toured the world with them in famous ballets like Swan Lake, the Nutcracker and Giselle. But her success only came after the Bolshoi ballet rejected her for being too tall.

Ian Redmond is a British conservationist best known for his work with great apes in Rwanda and elephants in Kenya. Over the years he's got pretty close to both, but in May of this year he got a bit too close for comfort to a charging elephant - he tells Matthew Bannister what happened.

Naveen Rabelli travelled from Bangalore in India to London in a solar powered tuk-tuk which he created himself in his garage in Bangalore. Outlook's Emily Webb went to meet him. Music "The Return" by Tadjar Junaid.

Image: Pakistani philanthropist husband and wife couple, Abdul Sattar (l) and Bilquis Edhi (r)
Credit: Getty Images

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50 minutes

Last on

Fri 23 Sep 2016 06:06GMT

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  • Thu 22 Sep 2016 11:06GMT
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