Oxygen for Nepal consortium sets out its plan in Kathmandu
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Nepal's second wave of COVID-19 arrived in the spring of 2021 and found the country short of the one thing a respiratory illness demands. Cylinders ran out. Queues formed outside filling depots.
On 31 May 2021 the Oxygen for Nepal consortium went before the media in Kathmandu at 9:45 in the morning, with doctors, a representative from each member organisation and government officials present. The event was livestreamed, and Kantipur's ekantipur site carried the story the same day.
The proposal was to stop buying oxygen and start making it. Rather than importing cylinders, the consortium would import pressure-swing adsorption plants that separate oxygen from ambient air on hospital premises, together with filling systems so that hospitals could supply cylinders to smaller facilities around them.
Members included the America Nepal Medical Foundation, Creasion, Jagdamba Steel, Humanity Foundation Nepal, Jyoti, Syakar Trading and Mission Rebuild Nepal. Mission Rebuild Nepal took the procurement and supply-chain role, having spent 2015 and 2016 moving building materials into a district that had no usable roads.
The same day, the organisation published a short video in which its president, the psychiatrist Dr Madan Uprety, walked through how an oxygen generator and a cylinder filling system actually work. The consortium also invited other fundraisers and non-profits collecting money for Nepal's COVID response to route it through the group rather than duplicate the effort.
