Training the public health workforce at the National School of Public Health: Meeting Africa's needs

摘要

The burden of chronic diseases continues to increase in Africa, and numbers of new skilled health personnel are not keeping pace. Training and increasing the number of health-care personnel, therefore, remains a priority in African countries. In an attempt to meet the human resource challenges, developed countries (e.g. the United States of America) have offered a number of scholarships to help increase the number of personnel; and for a long time the training of public health professionals in the African continent depended on such scholarships. These scholarships required that the students leave their home countries and study public health in foreign settings, where the systems are based on foreign health policies and under different economic situations.