Mr. Harish Jagtani, a philanthropist, visionary, businessman of Indian origin, currently based in Democratic Republic of Congo for more than 20 years now, is one of the most reputed business owners in the Indian diaspora as well as the entire expat business community in DRC. The business house caters to multiple domains, including but not limited to Domestic as well as International Air Cargo, real Estate and infrastructure development, healthcare, hospitality as well as CSR.

Coming from humble beginnings from Jaipur, Rajasthan, Mr. Harish Jagtani has come a long way in building this conglomerate with a strong and clear vision and sheer dedication and grit. Staring with a small job in sales, Mr. Harish Jagtani today is a proud and righteous owner of a fleet of airplanes and multiple businesses that cater to the basic and advanced needs of the people of Dem. Rep. of Congo in different sectors.

1) Tell us about your foundation? What motivated you to start the foundation?

Ans – So my HJ Foundation was started in 2016, It was the same year that I started my Hospital, but I have been around the country for sometime now, I have been in Congo since 30years now, I have travelled extensively in the interiors and I have seen what sorry state of health basically the people are in, they do not have access to basic health care, putting up such a huge Hospital with state of the infrastructure & Machinery’s, I still found that there are many people who could not access this health care services due to the lack of resources, because over all considering the social strategy here the population there are a lot of people still below the poverty line and they do not have even access to basic health care, so that is when basically I thought of putting a charity organization or a foundation, which would specifically focus on the health care, being in a country where people die due to minor issues such as Malaria just because lack of resources or they are able to access basic health care, I thought there could not have been a better work that I could do here providing free or even affordable health care services, so that is where the idea of HJ foundation came in where I propose or where I thought of starting an organization dedicated to health care for the under prevalaged.

2) Brief us about concept, Mission & vision

Ans – So the concept of HJ foundation, as I mentioned is being able to provide access to basic as well life saving health care to the people who are below the poverty line, who do not have adequate resources to fund their medicine to fund their health care, my vision is to make basic as well advance health care services accessible to every single household every single person in Congo.

3) Tell us about some of your common CSR programmes executed in the region.

Ans – So since the time that I started the foundation in 2016, HJ Foundation has conducted a huge number of CSR activities there are multiple health care campaigns that we keep running on a continuous basis or even every year every quarter a few of those programs are Stop Malaria campaigns, so here Malaria is quite rapen, people even die due to Malaria, so we do have Malaria testing we provide free Malaria testing to people, we conduct camps in different areas, different cities, be it orphanages, school’s, slums or even remote location’s across Congo we conduct this rapid Malaria test and even provide free medications to the people who test positive for Malaria, we have been conducting a lot of vaccination campaigns through out we conduct eye check up which is free of cost, we conduct dental check up in school’s, orphanages, old age homes, so this are some the basic CSR activities that we carry out on a regular basis apart from this we been doing major campaigns since the last couple of years which includes free cataract surgery campaign, which was given a name Gift a vision   ordong de la Visio, we started this campaign in 2020, where in we conducted 100 free of charge cataract surgery for conducting the same we also conducted a free eye check up under which we screened more than 2000 people in the city of Kinshasa, Mbujimayi as well as Goma and out of those campaigns 100 patience were benefited with free surgery, we are soon planning to start the next of this campaign, under which we would be taking care of 500 patients, 500 free cataract surgery’s. So yes these are some of the campaigns we have been conducting throughout.

4) What were the initial challenges? How did you overcome them?

Ans – I do not believe there were many challenges, because at the end of the day we are trying to do something for the people of the country something that will benefit the people of the country specially the people who need this, so the challenges part I think I have been lucky enough or I have been well supported by my team by the relevant people and we just needed to get to the right people, to get to the people who actually needed these reform’s needed these benefits, so yes people have been coming to us directly and by God’s grace we are been able to help them, we have been able to help them from our own pockets, till date HJ Foundation has not taken any amount from any other sponsors or beni- factors, we have been running this campaigns through self finding our entire group of companies contribute to these events these campaigns and running of the foundation. So I do not believe there have been any challenges rather, so nothing that concerns us about overcoming these challenges.

5) Who has been your greatest inspiration?

Ans – A part from following the ideals of many social leaders across the globe, I believe the person close to me, who has been the greatest inspiration is my Mother, she was the one who asked me to start this kind of work because even she has heard from me how people suffer here due to lack of resources due to lack of basic health care, how the lives of people are so easily lost, so she was the one who pushed me for this venture she was the one who told me to do something that can provide good health care, basic health care to the underprivileged people, to the masses and so that is where I believe my largest inspiration comes from, a part from the global leaders even if I talk about Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa if I need to speak about some realistic figure that I hold close to my heart would be my Mother, she has been my biggest inspiration for all my works.

6) What are the milestones achieved so far?

Ans – To be honest I don’t believe that I have been counting milestones, me and my entire team believes that even if you are able to change the life of one person even if  you are able to make a difference in the life of one person, it is something that we can be thankful for we can be grateful for, for the opportunity that we have been able to affect someone’s life in a positive way, as I have mentioned earlier we have done a lot of campaigns we did a Cataract campaign which included 100 free cataract surgeries, just last year we completed the first step of the prosthetic limbs campaign in which more than 570 people who were handicap due to different reasons, even handicap because of  situation of war I mean the army people or even civilians we have been able to fabricate and donate free prothetic limbs to them, that campaign itself in time span of 40 days we were able to fabricate and donate limbs to more than 570 people, so that I believe was a huge achievement for my team for gathering so many people at the same place and being able to help them out being able to make difference in their life or change their life, that is definitely one milestones that I would like to commend my team on they have really worked hard on it. Apart from it we are also currently conducting free dialysis sessions which started in November last year and till date, I can proudly say that around 400 dialysis sessions have been conducted free of charge, numerous patients have been benefited from it, so everyday we have around 4 to 6 sessions of dialysis that are completely free of charge  not a single cent is charge from any patient and till date from last year November we have conducted more than 400 free dialysis sessions.