Addressing Africa’s health workforce crisis

By McKinsey Consult

"Millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa suffer needlessly because they cannot obtain medical care from trained workers. Fully 820,000 additional doctors and nurses are needed to provide the region with even the most basic health services. The money to hire, train, and sustain such an increase won't be available in the foreseeable future. Even if funding materialized, 600 additional medical and nursing schools would be needed to fill the gap, and it would take more than two decades to train the requisite number of professionals. To ameliorate the problem in the coming decade, countries in Africa should build systems based on thoughtful ratios between professional and paraprofessional workers. Governments can't do so alone; the development community and the private sector also have roles to play."

This interesrting anylysis reminds me of a piece I did some time ago in which I quoted former US president Bill Clinton who said “You just can’t get the medicine, ship it into a country and drop it from the sky. If it is going to save people’s lives, the medicine must be accompanied by instructions, monitoring, by follow-up and by changing the medicine if necessary.”

..But sub-Saharan Africa averages 12.5 doctors per 100000 people, with dilapidated or nonexistent health structures in most countries.

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