Chimalaya Charity is a Danish/Nepalese NGO, founded in 2010 by psychotherapist Pia Torp, with the purpose of empowering mothers and giving newborns a better start in life by fighting dangerous malnutrition.

In 2013, Pia Torp and Chimalaya Charity entered into a collaboration with the doctors, researchers and Ph.D. Ram Krishna Chandyo and his wife, the pediatrician and researcher Manjeswori Ulak. They were both educated in the West, and now work in their homeland to improve the health of the local population. Together they established the mothers’ group clinic in Bode/Thimi just outside the capital Kathmandu, with the help of the local community. The clinic is the heart of our work. It covers a catchment area of about 25,000 people – an area with small towns and many carpet and brick factories where poor women toil with hard physical labor. For many locals, the clinic and its staff are a safe and familiar setting, which makes it easier to connect with the most vulnerable.

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. 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.

In 2016, Chimalaya Charity became an NGO in Nepal and now focuses fully on combating malnutrition.

Chimalaya Charity’s philosophy and approach to relief work

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’s leading doctors, Ph.D. Ram Krishna Chandyo and Dr. Manjeswori Ulak, are both postgraduates in, among other things Norway. They are 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.

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 school teachers to keep an eye out for vulnerable children and, when possible, the whole family. The clinic’s employees work closely with the municipality, which has made their property available to us.

Our work to combat malnutrition is steadily being assembled into a reliable and easy method that can eventually be adapted elsewhere.

We would like to develop the clinic to become a research and resource center that gathers information about children’s early development and combating malnutrition.