Chimalaya Charity Nepal

Chimalaya Charity began in 2014 and was officially registered with the Social Welfare Council on 29 May 2016. With the vision “Improving Maternal and Child Health”, Chimalaya Charity’s overall purpose is to combat malnutrition and promote health and development in children through empowerment and education of mothers and their families, especially promotion of breastfeeding. We want to ensure maternal health before and after birth, the survival of newborns and to reverse the negative growth curve of children under five years of age. Our work is always based on local needs when it comes to mother/child health. The overall framework for the projects is based on a common professionalism and exchange of ideas across borders. For example, the idea of mothers’ groups comes from the Nordic countries, but at our clinic the model is adapted to Nepalese conditions, so the result is optimal. The clinic is associated with The Center for International Health (CIH) in Bergen, which works to improve the health situation in countries with low incomes. CIH also facilitates international collaborations and research. This means, among other things, concretely, that the clinic has access to new research when it comes to malnutrition. The clinic also welcomes students from Global Nutrition from Akershus, University of Oslo, and from Danish home-visit nurse students (sundhedplejerske studerende). Built into our program, we have ongoing capacity building with training of local health workers. We like to involve the entire local community in our work. This could be, for example, training schoolteachers to keep an eye out for vulnerable children and, when possible, the whole family. . Our work to combat malnutrition is steadily being assembled into a reliable and easy method that can eventually be adapted elsewhere. The three main activities are: running of weekly Mother Groups, home visits to new mothers and capacity building in the form of education of home-visit nurses.