Healthy Village Nepal, known locally as Max Swastha Palika, is a four-year programme (2025 to 2029) in Jwalamukhi Rural Municipality, Dhading, that works through local government to reduce child stunting and bring safe water, sanitation and nutrition within reach of every ward.

In Jwalamukhi Rural Municipality, Dhading, around one in three children under five is stunted, roughly 40% of families rely on unsafe water sources, and about half live without basic sanitation. Jwalamukhi is a remote, hilly municipality where families live far from working health services, and the nearest functioning health post can be hours away. Chronic undernutrition, unsafe water and thin local markets reinforce one another, so change is hard to start and harder to sustain.

1 in 3

children under five are stunted

too small for their age

40%

rely on unsafe water sources

in the programme area

1 in 2

live without basic sanitation

across the municipality

Figures for Jwalamukhi Rural Municipality, the programme area.

Healthy Village Nepal works on four fronts at once (safe water, sanitation and hygiene, mother and child health, and local leadership), strengthening what Jwalamukhi already has rather than running services in parallel. It adapts the Healthy Village model that communities and governments in Bangladesh and Ethiopia have used to halve child stunting in three years, and hands leadership to the municipality from day one.

Safe drinking water

New and rehabilitated water points, and support for households to treat and store water safely.

Sanitation and hygiene

Latrines, handwashing and hygiene promoted ward by ward, until whole communities meet the standard.

Mother and child health

Growth monitoring for young children, with nutrition, antenatal and adolescent health support around them.

Local leadership

The municipality leads the work and folds it into its own plans and budgets, so it continues locally.

The model in practice

Community-owned, government-embedded

Certification runs through the municipality’s own systems, not a separate programme structure, so ownership stays local.

Entrepreneur-led, market-based

Local entrepreneurs, many of them women working at ward level, are trained to supply health and nutrition products, so services carry on once funding ends.

Data-driven

A baseline across all seven wards sets the targets, and progress is tracked against them throughout the programme.

By 2029, Healthy Village Nepal aims to reach 19,200 people across all seven wards of Jwalamukhi and cut child stunting from 35% to 25%. The programme began in July 2025, and its first months went into partnerships, approvals and a full baseline, the groundwork that lets the municipality lead at scale. The figures below are targets, not results yet.

19,200

people to be reached

across 5,400 households

7

wards of Jwalamukhi

every ward in the municipality

35→25%

child stunting

the 2029 goal

68 of 97

community units

to be declared Healthy Village

Already in place · 2025

Baseline completed across all seven wards, setting the programme’s targets.

Partnerships formalised with FOCUS Nepal, and a Memorandum of Understanding signed with Jwalamukhi Rural Municipality.

National inception workshop held in Kathmandu with federal and provincial ministries, universities and private sector, chaired by the municipality.

Learning from Bangladesh firsthand, as the team studied the Healthy Village programme there before implementation began.

Field team in place with Max Foundation’s Programme and Partnership Specialist supporting quality on the ground.

Baseline survey validation in Jwalamukhi, 2025.