What is MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) and what does the msf.org website cover?

MSF, or Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), is an international, independent medical humanitarian organisation. It provides medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare. The msf.org website is the organisation's main public platform, covering where it works, what programmes it runs, and current news and reports from its field operations.

What MSF does

MSF describes itself as an international, independent medical humanitarian organisation. Its stated purpose is to provide medical assistance to people affected by:

• Conflict
• Epidemics
• Disasters
• Exclusion from healthcare

The organisation says its actions are guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence, and neutrality. These principles are central to how MSF presents itself and decides where and how to intervene.

How the organisation is structured

MSF's teams are made up of tens of thousands of health professionals, plus logistic and administrative staff. According to the organisation, most of these staff are hired locally — meaning the majority of people delivering MSF's work come from the communities and regions where programmes operate, rather than being deployed only from outside.

Scale of operations

The msf.org homepage highlights several figures from its International Activity Report 2025:

These numbers give a sense of the volume of medical activity MSF reports across its programmes.

What the msf.org website covers

The site functions as both an organisational overview and a live record of MSF's work. Key sections include:

• About Us — explains MSF's identity, principles, and mandate as a medical humanitarian organisation.
• Where we work — states that MSF provides medical humanitarian assistance in more than 70 countries, with options to view an all-countries list or a map. The site notes that place names and boundaries on its map do not reflect any position by MSF on legal status, and that the map uses the Gall-Peters equal-area projection.
• Our Programmes — covers the types of medical and humanitarian programmes MSF runs.
• Latest news and project updates — reports on current situations, such as palliative care for women with cervical cancer in Malawi, people seeking safety in Greece, the situation in southern Yemen, conflict in Sudan, Ebola outbreaks in the DRC, and the Gaza-Israel war.
• Reports — including the International Activity Report, which summarises activity across countries.

How to use the site

If you want to understand what MSF is and whether it matches your interest — whether for research, donation decisions, or general awareness — the most useful entry points are:

1. About Us for the organisation's mandate and principles.
2. Where we work for the geographic scope and country-level presence.
3. Latest and Project Update items for current, specific examples of its work.
4. International Activity Report for aggregate figures on consultations, cases treated, and admissions.

The site presents MSF's own account of its mission, principles, and activities. For anyone assessing the organisation, these sections provide the primary claims and the scale of operations it reports.