In 2006, three Dutch doctors visit the Magbenteh hospital near Makeni, a city in Sierra Leone. They see great poverty and very limited medical facilities. The three decide that health care in this war and disease-ridden West African country should be structurally improved and set up the Lion Heart Foundation in April 2006.
The three doctors have been committed to the Magbenteh Hospital for a number of years to transfer it to local management in 2010. In the same year, they decided to build a small clinic for the employees of the palm oil factory in remote Yele, in the middle of the country. This clinic has now become a hospital with 70 beds for the poorest of the poor in Sierra Leone: the Lion Heart Medical Center.
The name Lion Heart Foundation was chosen to emphasize the ‘lion’s courage’ that was needed to build the hospital in one of the poorest countries in Africa, which was totally destroyed by the civil war. The name also refers to a mountain range in Sierra Leone, the ‘Lions Mountains’.