Further to the Trustees’ Meeting in October 2022, when the Nepal Trust and Stichting Nepal agreed to merge their projects in Nepal under a single delivery team, despite investing considerable effort and time in preparing a new combined 5 year project plan to register with the SWC, by June 2023 the two organisations had concluded not to pursue the merger and to remain operationally independent.
The immediate consequence for the Nepal Trust is that it has terminated its INGO registration in Nepal: to remain an INGO the Trustees would have had to commit to a budget in excess of $1m US over the next 5 years, which commitment the Trustees were not comfortable in giving.
Going forward the Nepal Trust will work through local NGO’s in Nepal, which in turn will register the projects with the SWC under their own names, with the Nepal Trust named as the sponsoring organisation for the project. The NDF (Nepal Development Foundation) will remain our primary point of contact in Nepal under the supervision of Jeroen van den Berg, who remains a Nepal Trust trustee.
Our focus will be on healthcare and education projects in Humla, which is our heartland. The health programme will be delivered on our behalf by SHIP Nepal, a local NGO in Humla with whom we have been working for the past 3 years.
More detail will be published once plans and budgets for 2024 onwards have been finalised.
