Estimates suggest more than 1 million health care professionals are needed to meet the critical health demands across Africa.
Africa has 11 % of the world’s population, 25% of the global disease burden but only 3% of the world’s health care professionals.
For more than 50 years AMREF has been working to close this gap. Every year AMREF trains more than 10,000 community health workers in 40 African countries. Programs also train doctors, nurses, midwives, clinical officers, laboratory technicians and pharmacists.
AMREF training takes place in communities, health centres, and hospitals. In 1973 AMREF opened its International Training Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. The centre runs the leading medical reference library in Africa, as well as several continuing medical education programs.
Graduates of AMREF training courses over the last 26 years have improved and saved more than 9 million lives.
AMREF SUCCESS: Tackling Kenya’s Nursing Shortage with eLearning
More than 85% of Kenya’s 20,000 nurses are trained at the certificate level but are not registered nurses. This means the majority of nurses are not qualified to treat critical diseases like HIV, TB or malaria. Training nurses in classrooms across Kenya is limited – only 100 can qualify each year.
To speed this up AMREF has been working closely with the Nursing Council of Kenya, the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the global consulting firm Accenture. Together they have produced more than 100 eLearning modules to register nurses. The modules are reaching nurses in the most remote areas of Kenya. Twenty-five nursing schools are also taking part in the program.
To date, more than 4,500 nurses have enrolled in the program and by 2011 the eLearning program is expected to train more than 20,000 nurses.
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