On May 2, the SOTA Convoys (SOTAC) team began a new season of surgical outreach across East Africa — a nearly two-month journey that will continue through June 29 and bring mobile surgical care to communities across Tanzania and Malawi.
Over the course of five surgical camps, the convoy will travel through Pangani, Iringa, and Mtwara in Tanzania before continuing into Malawi with stops in Mzuzu and Lilongwe.
For SOTAC, these deployments reflect a growing model of partnership, continuity, and access, bringing essential surgical care closer to patients who are too remote, too poor, or too limited by infrastructure to obtain it themselves.
Worldwide, billions of people lack access to safe surgical care. In many rural regions, a treatable condition can become life-altering simply because a patient cannot reach an operating theatre. SOTAC was created around a simple but increasingly proven idea: instead of requiring patients to travel long distances for care, bring the operating theatre to them.
That vision continues to take shape through partnerships with ministries of health, regional hospitals, local surgical teams, and community organizations throughout East Africa.
This season’s work builds on important momentum from the past year, including successful surgical camps in Burundi and the development of SOTAC’s growing “Continuity of Care” approach. Rather than focusing only on one-time interventions, SOTAC is working alongside partners to support recurring surgical outreach, strengthen referral systems, and expand long-term local capacity.
Each stop along the route brings its own context, challenges, and opportunities.
In Pangani and Iringa, the convoy will support ongoing outreach efforts in regions where patients often travel significant distances for surgical care. In Mtwara, partnerships continue to grow around coordinated regional access and referral support. In Malawi, visits to Mzuzu and Lilongwe represent an important next chapter as SOTAC continues developing relationships and exploring long-term collaboration opportunities with local healthcare leaders and institutions.
At every stage, the goal remains the same: safe, professional, and sustainable care delivered in partnership with local systems already serving their communities.
The work itself depends on far more than medicine alone. Mobile surgical care requires logistics, infrastructure, licensing, transportation, equipment maintenance, staffing coordination, and post-operative follow-up. It also requires trust — the kind built over time through partnership and shared commitment.
That collaboration remains central to SOTAC’s model. No single organization can solve the global surgical access gap alone. Meaningful progress happens when local providers, regional institutions, governments, and supporting organizations work together toward practical solutions.
Over the coming weeks, the SOTAC team will continue sharing updates from the road, stories from partner communities, and reflections on what it means to expand access to care in places where it has long been out of reach.
The distances are significant.
The need is real.
And the work continues.