Nand Wadhwani

Home » Officers » Nand Wadhwani

Born in India in 1947, Nand spent much of his youth in Hong Kong, where he received his initial training in the computer industry. He emigrated to Canada in 1967, where he lived for many years. He was employed as International Training Coordinator of the Systems Department for the Bank of Nova Scotia, and later as Worldwide Software Sales Support Manager for IBM. During this time he also served as president of his own international trading company, He traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and was profoundly affected by his contact with the primitive health care services available for Third World children. For more than 15 years he directed various committees in Canada, U.S. and elsewhere, providing volunteer fundraising, publicity and information services for UNICEF. At that time UNICEF reported that 40,000 children were dying every day, mostly due to malnutrition and preventable disease.

Nand was determined to find ways to reach health care workers and poverty-stricken families even in the most remote villages with basic information about malnutrition and especially about dehydration from diarrhoeal disease which was taking the lives of over two million children a year. He was convinced that the future lay in the nascent Internet. In 1997, he moved to Costa Rica and spent the next ten years developing first his Rehydration Project and later his Health Education to Villages (HETV). The Rehydration Project is the world's largest online data bank in the field of diarrhoea management, control, prevention and treatment, as well as oral rehydration. Amongst several other projects, HETV is currently working with UNICEF and the state of Maharashtra in India.

In 2007, Nand returned to his native India, where he continues to develop and support new research on health and education projects. He has just completed work on a new on-line portal on Mother, Infant and Young Child Nutrition and Malnutrition.

Nand lives in Goa, India.