UCSF-Tanzania get $7.5M from Gates Foundation for partnership to train African heal...( The University of California San Fra...),Health

The University of California, San Francisco has received a $7.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address the shortage of healthcare workers in Tanzania. The two-year grant will support a strategic collaboration between UCSF Global Health Sciences and the Muhimbili University of Health Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Tanzania to develop, implement and document strategies to enable MUHAS and other African institutions to meet their countries' health workforce needs.

UCSF and MUHAS will work together to develop a partnership and gather preliminary data to inform a long-term, sustainable partnership. UCSF Professor Sarah Macfarlane and MUHAS Professor Ephata Kaaya lead the collaboration.

Solving sub-Saharan Africa's healthcare worker shortage has long been a priority for governments, universities and international organizations, according to the collaborators. Tanzania's leaders recognize the need to educate and train more health care workers, they said. This project harnesses the resources of two major universities to approach the problem and aims to develop an institutional partnership model that can be replicated in other low-resource settings.

Faculty from the UCSF schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry will work with their MUHAS counterparts, as well as the MUHAS School of Public Health, to share curricula and educational technologies, and develop collaborative research programs.

"Through this collaboration, MUHAS will recruit and train faculty, strengthen the academic environment for education and research, and revise undergraduate and post-graduate curricula in order to increase its output of health professionals to serve the needs of the country," said MUHAS Vice Chancellor and Professor Kisali Pallangyo.

This grant will enable MUHAS, the only public university of health sciences in Tanzania, to plan and build capacity to meet Tanzania's long-term need for healthcare professi
'/>"/>