Oda Foundation Nepal began in 2013, when our Co-Founder and Managing Director, Karan Singh, a native of Odanaku VDC (now Mahawai rural municipality), led our American Co-Founder, John Christopher on a site assessment to his home village of Oda.

Karan had left Oda more than 10 years ago, before he was a teenager, to find work in northern India. After he worked his way into a stable job in tourism, he would return to Oda as often as he could with big boxes of medicine from India. This was partly a consequence to Karan's personal experience with preventable disease and mortality in his home village. As a young boy, Karan's father died of pneumonia because he could not get to a healthcare facility on time. John had just finished an education-based Fellowship in Surkhet and was looking for ways to support rural Nepal.

When the two were on their site visit to Oda, John fell gravely ill. Karan and others were forced to carry John down a steep hill where the nearest, and only, private pharmacy in the area would proceed to put him on IV medications for the cost of NPRs 2,000. The pharmacy had no health professional working in it, the cost of receiving medicine was absurdly high, and the medicine stock was not properly kept. It was after this experience that the two fully recognized the gap in healthcare service delivery in this particular rural municipality

In December of 2013, with $20,000 and a team of four, a section of Karan's mother's house was converted into a pharmacy and an OPD room and the first iteration of the Oda Foundation was born. At that time, our focus was on creating access to healthcare, 24/7, in the rural village of Oda.

In February of 2014, the organization began working in tandem with local government schools by giving English tuition to students. By the time the Oda Foundation had reached its first anniversary , its host community came to realize that our founding team was not interested in a short-term project in Oda, but rather was committing to the community indefinitely, as long as the community was receptive. Upon this realization, 6 members of the community donated land, allowing the Oda Foundation to build a campus including: the area's first health post, staff quarters, kitchen, and a public tuition classroom.

By 2017 we had a team of five healthcare professionals, six facilities staff, and two teachers, with a monthly patient count of roughly 1,000 and a daily student count of 175. Fast-forward to 2020 and our team has more than doubled to 30 individuals. Our medical staff has treated over 60,000 patients and includes the only female doctor in all of Kalikot (paid for by the rural municipality); our education staff has grown to seven and has merged with the local public school for a more sustainable education approach; and our rural campus has received both municipality-level and state-level funding to expand our healthcare efforts.

Looking forward, we plan to continue moving in the direction of sustainability. We plan to do this by eventually integrating our healthcare facility within Nepal's national health insurance program, decreasing our dependency on foreign funding for critical items such as medicine and diagnostic equipment. We are also looking into supporting the communities that we work with on an as-needed basis, outside of education and healthcare. For example, many of our beneciaries have extremely poor diets and struggle to maintain nutrition levels for themselves and their family. As a result, we have begun investing in a greenhouse and rainwater catchment pilot program to increase agriculture yields and improve nutrition.

Oda Foundation Nepal has a registered Nepali-based sister organization Himalayan Sewa Semaj Kendra to provide services and engage local stakeholders.