Welcome to Bridge2Aid

Oral diseases affect over 3.5 billion people around the world, hitting the poorest and most disadvantaged populations hardest. For more than two decades Bridge2Aid has focused on helping these communities by implementing preventative education and pain relief training.

We are a small UK based training charity. Our work is carried out through partnerships with communities, community health workers, dentists, dental associations and governments in Africa where we train people in oral health promotion and oral health education.  Our work is focused on deprived communities – especially remote and rural ones.

We focus on these communities because these are the areas where the problem is worst.  There is an extremely low level of oral health literacy, so communities are often unaware of even basic health behaviours, or information such as the link between dietary sugars and dental caries.  There is also very little access (if any) to any kind of dental treatment.  These left behind communities need to be given the tools and knowledge to become stronger and more resilient, which is where we come in.  Our approach is to listen to communities in need and ask, ‘How can we help?’.  Through listening and developing training specific to the needs of the community we can ensure that the training we deliver is always appropriate and effective.

Most of our training is delivered by African dentists and health workers.  We are empowering our colleagues and partners in East Africa by putting them at the centre of our training – and we’re working with them to train more trainers. Working this way means that we can expand our training in prevention and pain relief while meeting the increasing need.

Our aim is to advance global health education.  We are open to developing training anywhere in the world where our help is requested.  Our focus will always be delivering the best training possible and changing the health of communities in need.

Our current work is focused around 4 key areas:

1. Community Oral Health Promotion.
2. Ending Infant Oral Mutilation.
3. As well as our work in Africa we have begun working with UK universities to identify local area of need. We are then developing training programmes with dental students acting as community educators.
4. Developing training for all levels of health workers in remote and rural locations in the developing world.