NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, December 2, 2013

Over the past decade, we have made extraordinary gains against the world’s deadliest diseases thanks to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. These initiatives are saving millions of lives every year. In order to make these gains truly sustainable, we must now address a critical challenge in low-income countries: an acute shortage of highly-trained health professionals.

While Sub-Saharan Africa bears 24 percent of the global disease burden, it’s served by only 4 percent of the global health workforce. As the World Health Organization just announced, the global health worker shortage stands at more than 7.2 million today and is expected to grow to 12.9 million by 2035.

A report that my colleagues and I published in the “New England Journal of Medicine” offers compelling new evidence about the power of partnership in helping Rwanda, my country, to overcome this obstacle. The Human Resources for Health program – financed by PEPFAR and The Global Fund – is building health care worker capacity in Rwanda over the next seven years to ensure that we can meet the pressing health challenges facing our people.