Human Resources for Health
A capable and motivated workforce is central to delivering high-quality primary health care and HIV/AIDS services. But in many regions, there is a shortage and uneven distribution of trained healthcare workers. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa; despite having 11 percent of the world’s population and 24 percent of the global burden of disease, the region has only 3 percent of the world’s health workers.
How CHAI Helps
CHAI’s Human Resources for Health (HRH) Programs leverage our organizational expertise and on-the-ground experience to assist governments with new approaches to increase and retain capable human resource capacity. CHAI has pursued country-specific HRH strategies in nine countries in Africa, which include expanding and improving pre-service training programs, improving the processes by which hiring and deployment decisions are made, collecting national human resource information to facilitate better planning, providing training and clinical mentoring, and strengthening healthcare worker retention.
For example, CHAI launched an ambitious program in Zambia to help the government expand the capacity and improve the quality of the national health workforce. Zambia had been working at less than half the workforce needed to deliver basic health services, and CHAI helped to identify the key driver of the HRH shortage – an insufficient number of new healthcare workers entering the workforce. CHAI is now helping the government with several targeted interventions, including the scale up of pre-service training programs that aim to dramatically expand the number of qualified workers entering the health workforce. As a result of this and other measures, the government is on track to fully bridge its healthcare worker gap.
PROFILE
As Vice President of Country Operations, Kanika Bahl designs strategies for CHAI projects in each country, helps to procure the necessary tools, and faces challenges as they arise.
