Woodrow Wilson
Melbourne, Australia

Since 2014 I have been documenting developing aid programs across the world for a variety of NGO’s across education, healthcare and infrastructure.

In 2015 I was invited to document my first surgical aid program by Dr Dilip Gahankari in a remote village in central India called Mahan. That started a journey that changed my life indelibly.

Around 18 months ago I was in Uganda, joined by an international team to open a new hospital that had taken 4 years of fundraising to realise.

On our first day, around 150 burnt, injured and amputated children arrived from a call out in the region - and it was a scene that I have personally experienced repetitively in India, Tonga, Samoa, Mongolia and Papua New Guinea over the last 8 years. It’s an overwhelming story for most, but such an important one that I’ve become an advocate for. 

My role has always been to create short content pieces for fundraising - but after all these projects, I realised that the general public is still very much in the dark around surgical access in lower- and middle-income countries. 

In addition, the public is unaware of the incredible work Australian and New Zealand teams do with limited resources, especially after a decade of the decline of foreign aid. 

To my knowledge, after much research, I do not believe a feature documentary covering this topic has been created yet and I feel I am in a unique position to tell it given my experience, familiarity with the subject and community I have made over the years.