02 Jun 2015

The University of Botswana's Faculty of Health Sciences will host the final meeting of the Afya Bora Consortium for Training Global Health Leaders for the 2014/2015 fellows in Gaborone on June 29. 

A press release from the institution stated that permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health, Mrs Sheenaz El-Halabi, is expected to officiate. The meeting would also be attended by dignitaries from the health ministry, WHO, CDC, PEPFAR coordinators from participating countries, current and past fellows as well as academicians from partner institutions.

The 2015/2016 group of fellows would also be oriented. The University of Botswana is a member of the Afya Bora Consortium which offers a global health leadership training programme initiated in 2011 by the University of Botswana, Makerere University (Uganda), University of Nairobi (Kenya) and Muhumbile University of Health and Allied Sciences (Tanzania). 

The release states that the universities are partnering with four others from the United States of America to respond to the increasing need of innovative experimental leadership training for nurses and doctors in an African setting.

The four American Universities include Upenn, University of Washington Seattle, Johns Hopkins University and University of California San Francisco. The release also states that a competency based curriculum was developed to provide the fellows with practical management and leadership skills that are not part of routine pre-service training in the health professions.

The year- long fellowship was designed to involve a total a total of eight weeks of didactic lectures, offered at three classroom learning blocks rotating at the African universities, separated by two, four and half-month long experimental attachment site rotations and identified local governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in health related activities in the four African countries.

Further, the release says the didactic modules aim to empower fellows to develop skills in communication, leadership, monitoring and evaluation, implementation science, health informatics, research methods, grant writing, project management, human resources and budgeting as well as global health policy and governance.

Again, it says classroom-based modules employ case-based discussions in small groups and draw on Africa-focused case-studies. Each year, 20 fellows (four from each country) are admitted into the fellowship and each fellow is expected at the end of fellowship to produce a report on a mutually agreed beneficial project.

By June this year, 68 fellows would have graduated from the fellowship including 14 Batswana health professionals.  The meeting would receive and discuss reports on health projects which the current fellows had carried out at attachment sites. ENDS