Chenla Children’s Healthcare’s mission in Cambodia is to provide accessible high-quality, compassionate medical care to children most in need, improve the infrastructure of the health system, and improve health worker education. Working in direct partnership with the Ministry of Health of the Royal Government of Cambodia, we utilize existing government facilities, medication, supplies, and staff to provide international standard medical care to Cambodian children suffering from infectious disease, febrile illness, premature birth, and more in the remote Kratie and Mondulkiri Provinces. Strengthening the social contract between the local community and the public healthcare system forms the foundation of what we do. We provide all services free of charge for poor patients and their families.

Chenla is an international NGO that sees success as becoming obsolete as the public sector is able to run the program independently and sustainably while maintaining the same level of compassionate high quality care. Our immediate and long term goals are to see continued decreased neonatal and pediatric morbidity and mortality rates in the communities we serve. Our long term vision is to work hard enough to work ourselves out of being needed at all. This long term vision, we believe, is a very unique, innovative and highly worthwhile aspect of Chenla Children’s Healthcare.

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Contribute heavily to decreasing neonatal and pediatric mortality in the eastern provinces of Cambodia.

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Two: Maximize Chenla’s public-private partnership model so that every amount of donor funding is utilized where and how it is needed most to achieve strategic goal #1.

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Three: Work hard, compassionately and with high quality so that over the long term we work ourselves out of being needed at all to achieve strategic goal #1.

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Describe an investment in leadership

Chenla Children’s Healthcare was founded in 2016 through the hard efforts of a highly committed and compassionate group of Cambodian leaders who were willing to take a risk for the betterment of the common good for their society. In the past year, we have built upon this leadership foundation by further empowering Chenla’s Cambodian leadership team to cast a strategic vision and further manage the vast majority of clinical and expenditure aspects of the organization. One-on-one mentoring was provided to each of Chenla’s management team, but more importantly, their group vision for the organization through a strategic planning retreat performed in November 2021 is now being implemented organization-wide. Local empowerment is the key to Chenla Children’s Healthcare’s leadership development strategy.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Strategic Partnerships

• Networks of Collective Impact Efforts

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

• Community Building

• Policy Advocacy

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

Chenla Children’s Healthcare’s strategic partnerships are numerous. First and foremost, we partner with the Ministry of Health working as a direct part of the referral hospitals in Kratie and Mondulkiri provinces. Our next expansion plan is to do the same in Steung Treng Province. Second, we partner with the University of Puthisastra in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to train medical students in high quality rural pediatric care so that they too will be much better equipped to help improve neonatal and pediatric mortality in the future. In addition, we work closely with National Pediatric Hospital Phnom Penh. Our NGO partners on the ground in Cambodia include All Ears Cambodia, Mercy Medical Center Phnom Penh, UNICEF Kratie Office, FIDR Kratie Pediatric Surgery Project, Kinchan Stiftung pre-school education project in Kratie as well as Kantha Bopha Hospitals in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.

The Covid-19 pandemic indeed produced tremendous change beginning in early 2020 for Chenla Children’s Healthcare and our hospital work. Our response was fairly simple. Stay calm. Carry on with our mission. Add the dynamic of caring for COVID-19 patients. Protect our staff and prevent transmission within our community. In both 2020 and 2021, Chenla Children’s healthcare adapted quickly and bravely to the tremendous changes caused by the pandemic.