Lessons from Dan Fountain’s Struggle For Whole Person Care in Mobutu’s Congo

In 1961, eighteen months after the violent expulsion of the Belgian colonial powers, Dan Fountain entered a fractured Congolese landscape. Over the next 35 years amidst the dictatorial regime of Mobutu’s kleptocracy with inflation rates of 24,000% (IMF price level increases by a factor of 4.25 billion) and the outbreak of the HIV epidemic, Fountain helped construct a primary care infrastructure that would extend through the entire country. His story, though little known to many of us now, was so ground-breaking at the time that it made its way to the director general of the WHO and formed the basis of the now-famous Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978, the slogan of which was “Health Care for All.” We provide you the key lectures that he developed with Sherry O’Donnell on his return to the U.S., which outline his tested principles of how to provide comprehensive medical care to the most vulnerable populations of our world.