Multiply
← All causes
Health & surgeryFinancial documents reviewed

CURE International

Legal name: CURE International Inc · EIN 58-2248383

CURE runs children’s surgical hospitals that treat clubfoot, cleft lip, burn contractures, hydrocephalus, bone infections and spinal deformity. Families are not charged. Local surgeons are trained to lead the programs, and chaplains pray with patients and families.

Ethiopia · Kenya · Malawi · Niger · Philippines · Uganda · Zambia · Zimbabwe

We pulled the spending and outcome counts out of the ministry’s audited statements or annual report ourselves and did the division in public.

Give on cure.orgMinistry site

Your gift

$1$5$10$50$100$500
$

380 gifts of $5 cover one surgery for a child. Yours is 0.26% of one.

The division

FY2025 program spending
$39,853,533
2025 Annual Report
divided by surgeries performed, FY2025
21,019
2025 Annual Report
per surgery for a child
$1,896

Every program dollar is charged to this one outcome. Those same program dollars also pay for clinic visits, casting, rehabilitation, staff training and chaplaincy, so charging all of them to surgeries overstates what one surgery costs. CURE’s own FY25 figure is $1,704 per surgery — 11% below this one, which is about the agreement you would expect between the two methods.

Other defensible denominators

  • $145 each, dividing by people who heard the gospel through CURE in FY25 — The same program spending divided by the number of people CURE reports sharing the gospel with: about $145 each. It is the same money as the surgery figure, counted against a different outcome — the two cannot be added together.

What the ministry advertises

  • “Efficiency is increasing. 40% decrease in cost per surgery”

    2025 Annual Report

    Advertised: $1,704 per surgery. Documented: $1,896. The two agree within 11%.

Why this is the church’s work

Healing the sick was how Jesus made the kingdom visible, and he sent his disciples out to do the same. A child with an untreated clubfoot in Niger is precisely the person the gospel puts at the front of the queue.

  • “And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.”

    Matthew 9:35

  • “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

    Luke 14:13–14

  • “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

    Matthew 25:40

Doctrinal position we read: “We share Jesus” is one of five stated distinctives — Financial accountability page and homepage

Our reservations

  • Medical mission carries a permanent risk that care becomes the price of a hearing. CURE treats children regardless of their family’s faith, which is the right answer, but we have not read a written policy on how chaplains handle consent.

A judgement about the work, not a measurement of its results. We do not score souls.

Why a dollar goes further here

Income per person in Malawi is about 148× below the United States.

The operations happen in eight low-income countries, in CURE’s own hospitals, increasingly by surgeons from those countries. About $1,900 covers a whole surgical episode — theatre, implant, ward stay, casting and rehabilitation — because every input except the imported hardware is priced locally. Training national surgeons is the part that compounds: the FY25 report follows an Ethiopian surgeon trained at CURE Kenya now leading Ethiopia’s first paediatric spine programme.

What creates the leverage

  • Low local cost base — Wages, rent, fuel and materials are priced to the local economy, so the same work costs a fraction of what it costs in a high-income country.
  • Local workers, not sent staff — The work is done by believers who already live there. No relocation, no expatriate salary, no home-country cost of living to cover.
  • Builds something that lasts — The money buys a well, a building or a piece of equipment that keeps delivering for years after the gift.
  • Multiplies without more money — The thing funded goes on to produce more of itself — a church that plants churches, a leader who trains leaders — so later results are not paid for again.

The cost base, country by country

CountryIncome per personBelow United States
Malawi$600148×
Niger$750118×
Ethiopia$1,11080×
Uganda$1,12079×
Zambia$1,20074×
Kenya$2,20040×
Zimbabwe$2,66033×
Philippines$4,85018×

GNI per capita, Atlas method, current US dollars · World Bank · read 2026-09-19

This is a cost-of-living ratio, not a measure of how well the ministry spends. It tells you what a local wage or a bag of cement costs, and nothing about whether the work is any good — the rest of this page is for that.

Desk review

13 of 15

Gospel centrality
Named and structural, not incidental: "We share Jesus" is one of five stated distinctives, and FY25 reporting counts 275,288 people who heard the gospel alongside the surgical numbers.
Is the gospel named and central, rather than implied by the ministry’s history?
Local leadership
Hospitals are staffed and increasingly led by national clinicians — the FY25 report follows an Ethiopian surgeon trained at CURE Kenya now leading Ethiopia’s first pediatric spine program. Governance and fundraising remain US-based.
Is the work led and staffed by believers from the place it serves?
Financial transparency
Statement of activities printed in the annual report, Form 990 filings back to 2002, and four separate accreditations. One unexplained gap between the report and the 990 — see below.
Can an outsider find audited statements, a Form 990, and accreditation?
Evidence of outcomes
Surgeries are a delivered service and are counted per hospital, which is well above the sector norm. But the counts are CURE’s own, and there is no published follow-up on how children do a year later.
Does the ministry publish counts of what was delivered, defined clearly enough to check?
Cost per outcome is computable
Both numbers are published, CURE divides them itself, and its answer and ours agree within 11%. Nothing else in this directory is this checkable.
Are both a spending figure and an outcome count published, so cost per outcome can be divided out?

What we have not verified

  • The FY25 annual report shows $64,071,632 of revenue and $47,780,480 of expenses. The Form 990 for the same year end shows $63,231,992 and $45,918,222. The difference is unexplained by either document and is worth a phone call before a large gift.
  • The audit covers the money, not the surgery count. No one outside CURE has verified that 21,019 surgeries happened.
  • The $1,704 and $2,862 cost-per-surgery figures come from a chart image inside the PDF. The extracted text was legible and internally consistent with the stated 40% decrease, but confirm against the printed report before quoting them.
  • No published data on patient outcomes after discharge.

Accreditation seen

  • ECFA accredited
  • Charity Navigator four stars
  • Candid Platinum Transparency 2025
  • Excellence in Giving certified transparent

Displayed by the ministry on its own pages. We have not re-checked each seal with the accrediting body.

Worth knowing

  • FY25 was the highest surgical volume in CURE’s history: 21,019 surgeries, up from 9,414 in 2021, while cost per surgery fell.
  • 27% of FY25 giving went to capital projects — five new surgical centers — so some of this year’s money buys future surgeries rather than this year’s.

Sources