AMREF calls on Global Forum to Walk the Talk: Invest in Innovation to Increase Africa’s Health Workforce
“We need to walk the talk by investing in human resources for health,” says Dr Peter Ngatia, AMREF’s Director for Capacity Building.
“Walking the talk means investing in innovative methods of training and retaining health workers. Scaling up of human resources production cannot happen unless we invest in the use of technology to train the numbers that are required. The 105 medical schools in Africa do not have the capacity to meet the urgent demand for doctors, nurses and midwives among many other cadres of health workers. Yet until we have adequately trained numbers of health workers, the attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will remain an illusion.”
This forum is being convened by the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA), the Prince Mahidol Award Conference, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). It is also being supported by many other agencies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, the China Medical Board and the World Bank.
AMREF is a leader at the 2nd Global Forum on Human Resources for Health offering several workshops and speaking on panels. Several AMREF case studies have also been shortlisted for awards. Read more about AMREF's involvement in the Forum here.
AMREF's message to the Global Forum
AMREF believes that the following areas must be addressed in developing human resources for health:
- Increase in the number of health workers produced in Africa
- Increase in the number of health workers produced in developed countries to stem immigration on Africa's health workforce
- Reduction of rural-urban migration of health workers
- Reduction of movement of health workers from public to private sectors
- Increase in the development of skills and competencies of the existing health workforce
- Taskshifting where specific tasks are moved where appropriate from highly skilled health workers to health workers with shorter training and fewer qualifications, e.g. doctors to clinical officers, to make the health systems more efficient and increase access to quality health services.
These can only be achieved through:
- Use of innovative methods of training health workers, including doctors, clinical officers, nurses, midwives and community health workers e.g. application of ICT, eLearning, m-learning and telemedicine
- Increased investment in production of health workers
- Delivery of the 15% budgetary allocations pledged by African governments to improve the working conditions of health workers in rural areas and public health facilities
- Increasd investment by global health initiatives in HRH development in Africa
The critical shortage of health workers in sub-Saharan Africa is the key focus of AMREF's advocacy. For more information on what AMREF is doing to address the global health worker crisis, please click here.