About Us

FREO2 Foundation (FREO2) is a global not-for-profit organisation that aims to reduce the number of deaths of babies and children suffering from pneumonia or hypoxia in low-and-middle-income countries (LMIC’s). We envision a world where every child can breathe, live and thrive. Our mission is to improve access to oxygen to save lives and reduce inequalities in health. 

Pneumonia remains the leading cause of death for children under five and is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Pneumonia kills 800,000 children each year, claiming the life of one child every 39 seconds. 

Medical oxygen is a proven life-saving intervention, shown to significantly reduce pneumonia mortality by up to 35%. However, oxygen treatment remains inaccessible to many severely ill children in LMIC’s. Traditional oxygen cylinders are extremely costly and hard to come by in remote areas, while commercial oxygen concentrators require regular maintenance and a constant energy supply. In many low resource health facilities, power outages are frequent and often deadly; a hypoxic child cannot survive beyond 7 minutes without a constant oxygen supply.

The FREO2 team is committed to saving lives by developing and deploying our novel medical oxygen technologies to improve access to oxygen and patient care at the under-resourced periphery of health services. FREO2 oxygen innovations are affordable, developed specifically to be installed in the most remote parts of the world and can provide a constant supply of oxygen, even during a power outage. 

We are passionate about making a sustainable impact. That's why we’ve trained (and continue to expand) a team of in-country biomedical engineers and technicians who ensure that our FREO2 systems are properly maintained and routinely serviced. FREO2 technologies are now saving children’s lives in health facilities in Uganda, Tanzania and the Pacific.

So far we have treated 5,619 children with FREO2 enabled oxygen, expanded across 45 health facilities and trained 902 health care workers.