When Médecins Sans Frontières accepted the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, its representative told the room that silence can kill. The organization was born from that conviction. During the 1967 to 1970 blockade of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War, young French doctors working with the Red Cross watched civilians being deliberately starved and came to see the Red Cross policy of silent neutrality as complicity. Back in Paris they joined volunteers who had responded to a cyclone in East Pakistan, and on December 22, 1971, they founded MSF on two principles: care across all borders and témoignage, the duty to bear witness.

That principle was tested repeatedly. In 1979 co-founder Bernard Kouchner wanted to charter a ship to rescue Vietnamese boat people, and when leadership refused he left to form Médecins du Monde. In Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985 MSF denounced the government’s use of food aid for forced resettlement and was expelled. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide it lost nearly 100 local staff and called for French military intervention, declaring that you cannot stop a genocide with doctors, then pulled back toward neutrality. Today it works in over 75 countries with more than 67,000 staff.

• MSF’s annual budget exceeds 2.6 billion euros, funded mostly by small private donors
• In 2020 over a thousand staff signed a petition accusing the organization of systemic racism in pay and evacuations
• A 2015 US airstrike on its Kunduz trauma hospital killed 14 staff and 28 patients and caretakers
• MSF rejected the US apology and demanded an independent investigation
• The color coded MUAC arm band for malnutrition entered MoMA’s design collection in 2025