"Abdul Sattar Edhi, who was born in Gujarat, India moved to Karachi in 1941 with the independence of Pakistan and started social welfare business since then."

At first, he established 2 public medical facility to provide medical services to the poor, then bought ambulances and named them 'Vans for the poor'.

Edhi established the Edhi Foundation in 1953 for more systematic social welfare business. The foundation gradually developed as people started to understand its humanistic goal, and Edhi started to be called as the angle of mercy. In particular, when an out-worn apartment in Karachi collapsed in 1973, the volunteer workers and ambulances of Edhi foundation were the first to arrive to rescue people. Since this incident, whenever a problem occurred in either Karachi or in Pakistan, people first asked the Edhi Foundation for help. Then ambulances of the foundation went anywhere to transfer injured people to hospitals and the foundation held funerals for those without any relative.

Currently the Edhi Foundation is conducting a variety of social welfare businesses including patient transferring service, aid for refugees, field emergency service, running blood and medical supplies bank, welfare center, houses for the poor and schools for orphans. Edhi is running 9 medical facilities in Karachi alone, some 300 welfare centers throughout Pakistan and is devoting his life for the welfare and wellbeing of Pakistanis in need. Despite the development of the Foundation, Edhi always wears humble grey clothes, does the cleaning himself and uses all the spaces in the building for his works, except for one room where he lives.

Edhi's such humble lifestyle and philanthropic spirit is the result of the lessons learnt by his mother who always told him to help others since he was young. For instance, his mother always gave two coins to him and told him to use o for himself and the other for others, and to explain her where and how he used them.

Pakistanis' pride in Edhi and the Edhi foundation can be seen from the saying, 'Edhi is to Karachi what Mother Teresa was to the poor of Calcutta.'