Bad news! Serious stuff!
"Africa's health workforce crisis isn't just about training too few workers—it's about retaining those already trained. The region faces a shortage of 5.85 million health workers by 2030, per a WHO report.
Yet roughly 30% of trained health professionals in the report’s nine-country sample are unemployed—nearly one million people continent-wide—while systems remain understaffed ... They argue that these shortcomings stem from historic reliance on training specialists abroad, where many stayed permanently or struggled to reintegrate into under-resourced home systems.
Nearly half of African health workers say they'd leave given the chance. ..."
"... We have also seen promising results from a different training model.
Ethiopia hosts one strand of the Pediatric Anesthesia Training for Africa (PATA) fellowship, which trains anesthesiologists to specialize in children’s care—in Africa, for Africa. PATA began at the University of Nairobi in 2022, then expanded.
Over time, two Ethiopian anesthesiologists trained at a PATA site in Nairobi, Kenya, then returned and helped build a fellowship of their own. PATA graduates now serve as faculty teaching Ethiopia’s first cohort.
Local training prepares professionals to succeed within the realities of local healthcare systems, and it builds a compelling community of practice that is “sticky” enough to support retention. That community is growing fast. PATA now runs across five countries, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya. So far, it has graduated 32 pediatric anesthesiologists from eight countries who now serve a total population of roughly 598 million people.
Retention has been essentially 100%: Of the 32 graduates, only two have relocated, and both stayed within Africa.
Similar training programs can be found at the West African College of Surgeons, the University of Nairobi, and Cape Town’s Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, among others–—collectively marking a broader continental shift: training pediatric surgical specialists on the continent, for the continent. ..."
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