One Heart Worldwide

One Heart Worldwide’s mission is to make pregnancy and childbirth safer in underserved areas of Nepal. We envision a locally-led health system that provides equitable access to quality care for all women and their children. Our model, the Network of Safety, is specifically designed to address the systemic barriers to care faced by pregnant women and their newborns living in remote areas. By partnering directly with the Nepali government and local stakeholders, we support their capacity to design and maintain a culturally compassionate and effective continuum of maternal and neonatal healthcare based on their unique local context and priorities. In this way, we ensure that every pregnant woman and newborn has access to lifesaving services, even those living in last-mile environments. OHW was founded in 1998 as a project in the Tibetan Autonomous Region through the University of Utah and opened a base of operations in Nepal in 2010. Since then, we have scaled from our original two pilot districts to improve access to quality MNH care for more than 2 million pregnant women and their infants across 36 districts. We have trained 24,000 Community Outreach Providers; 22,000 Community Stakeholders; and 17,000 rural healthcare providers. In addition, we’ve trained over 900 skilled birth attendants. We’ve also upgraded over 900 remote rural birthing centers and obtained impressive government buy-in, with 97% of rural municipalities allocating funds to MNH in their administrative budgets. We’ve reduced our cost-per-pregnancy from $2,153 in 2010 to $32 in 2025. External evaluations have found that our work, in collaboration with the Government of Nepal, has led to substantially accelerated progress towards helping Nepal achieve its SDGs for maternal and infant mortality.