Habari — Liz Pavlovich: Weill Bugando University hosts first research symposium
Recently I learned that 60 percent of all babies born in sub-Saharan Africa are not born in a health facility, but rather, in the unsanitary and ill-equipped conditions of the home. This primarily happens in rural villages where women are not able to reach a health facility easily because of the distance or lack of transport and money.
If women bring their baby to the health facility after delivery, more than half of the time it is too late and the child dies. As a result, the odds are stacked against babies who are not born at health facilities. Nearly five times as many of these newborns die within the first couple of days than those babies born at facilities due to hypothermia, sepsis (inflammation of the entire body due to an infection) and other complications, compared to those born in health facilities.
This was just one of the research findings presented by Bugando University faculty and staff at the first research symposium hosted by this eight-year o
ld university in Mwanza, Tanzania. The National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) provided their brand new facility for the symposium, which accommodated about 300 people anxious to share knowledge about critical health topics such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other serious conditions and diseases prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa.
The importance of conducting research at academic institutions could not be emphasized enough by the keynote speaker, Dr. Kapiga. Research opportunities provide fuel for academic institutions such as Bugando to attract well-qualified faculty, offer exciting extracurricular activities to students, gain additional funding and integrate themselves into the international exchange of knowledge. Not to mention that research findings enable medical practitioners to better assist their patients, drug companies to improve treatments, and governments to better help their populations. With the findings I shared earlier, we better understand how important it is to the survival of newborns for the mother to deliver in a facility with the proper equipment and staff. This could justify the need for governments and organizations to provide education programs in rural communities that encourage women to go to health facilities for antenatal care and delivery or, likewise, encourage the training of greater numbers of health workers who are equipped to do outreach work in rural areas.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the opportunity to do research is very low because of lack of funds and facilities. It was very exciting to see Bugando showcase their hard work last week despite these inherent challenges. The Touch Foundation and other partners of the university will continue to support Bugando’s drive to conduct research. Ultimately, this research will generate knowledge that will help to improve health conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Habari – News From Bugando – is a periodic blog posting by Liz Pavlovich, a Program Officer for the Touch Foundation who is based in Mwanza Tanzania. Since 2004, the Touch Foundation (www.touchfoundation.org) has been working with Tanzanian partners to address the health worker shortage by expanding the Bugando regional medical training college and teaching hospital. Bugando’s University is the second largest of five institutions training medical doctors in the country. It also trains health workers in seven other disciplines – post-graduate MDs, nurses, assistant medical officers, radiographers, pharmacists and laboratory technologists. The school is now training 900 students.
Jairos N Hiliza — Perspectives on Brain Drain from a Tanzanian MD Student
I am a Tanzanian born to a poor family in a western part of Tanzania, Kigoma region, where everything signifying poor development is vividly seen; such as muddy seasonal roads, poor health facilities and absence of electricity.
Upon completion of my advanced secondary education I was enrolled at Weill Bugando University as a medical student. I have reached this point despite many difficulties. I recently sat down to figure out the education system in Tanzania, especially with regard to health worker training and realized that “brain drain” cannot be stopped unless the system is changed. I write this to let the know how the Tanzanian society is stratified (classified) and, hence, favors brain drain.
As I see it, there are three strata when it comes to the possession of wealth in Tanzania.
The first stratum covers those with high ranks in government leadership such as the ministers, members of parliaments and various managers and general secretaries of public and private offices. International businessmen are included in this class. Regarding health care, when they become sick the take a flight to developed countries such as the USA and UK for treatment. Also their sons and daughters do not study in Tanzanian schools or universities, so when they graduate, they are not willing to work in poor working conditions as I described above, because they do not know the problems facing Tanzania and are not used to this environment. They opt to work in wealthier countries that agree with their class and standard of living.
The second stratum comprises those who are private and government employees and live in the cities and towns. Since they earn a monthly salary, they are able to take their sons and daughters to mostly privately-owned secondary schools with all the teaching facilities and plenty of well-qualified teachers and expensive school fees. These pupils are the ones to score best. The Tanzanian government enrolls students in universities and gives them loans to meet university costs based on the grades they receive. So this group, who is raised in towns and cities like their parents had been, are the ones to get university level education. When graduated they want to work in towns but there are no vacancies and telling to go work in remote villages and poor towns where real problems exist is like telling them to go to hell, so they opt to move to well developed countries to find work.
The third class comprises the laborers, nomadic persons and local farmers (hand and hoe farmers) who are living under less than one US dollar and send their sons and daughters to local secondary schools, nick-named “Saint Kayumba”. These secondary schools are built by politicians in order to win votes from this class of uneducated people, so these schools are called “political secondary schools” and are, in actuality, only buildings that do not fulfill the purpose of a school. You find two teachers with thousands of pupils, no teaching materials and poor working conditions so that education is very poor. These pupils end up doing poorly in school so the idea of becoming a university student will remain an unfulfilled dream. And these people are the ones who know the situations of ordinary Tanzanians especially when it comes to the health sector because they and their relatives are facing these problems. Sadly, they do not have a say with the government or any other vehicles to enable them to get the know how to save themselves and their people.
Weill Bugando University realized that too many students in the third class I described were not given any opportunities because they have low grades due to the poor education system in their home secondary schools. This university, along with the Catholic Church and Governing Board, sat down and decided to target these students especially. Funnily enough, amongst Tanzanians and according to the Tanzanian Commission of Universities (TCU), Weill Bugando University has first rank academic performance compared to other public and private medical universities. I am sure graduates including myself are going to help and heal Tanzanians because we know the inner core of Tanzania’s health problems, and the sufferers in poor towns and villages to which we belong.
Whomever helps this third class of Tanzanian people not only will be healing the whole Tanzanian population but, also, will be helping Tanzania to minimize if not to eliminate the brain drain problem. Thanks to Touch Foundation for linking us to heart-felt people around the world to make sure that their support reaches us quickly and unchanged.
I belong to the villages so after my graduation I MUST return to save and heal my people. I am ready to cooperate with anybody who is assisting Tanzania in the health sector to save the majority of Tanzania’s population.
Jairos N Hiliza is a third-year MD student at Weill Bugando University in Mwanza, Tanzania.
Eric Williams — Push and Pull Factors Affecting Attrition of Health Workers
The global shortage of health workers poses one of the greatest challenges to health and development for developing nations. The World Health Organization estimates that 57 countries – 39 of which are African nations – have severe shortages and require some 4.3 million health workers to fill immediate and critical gaps in fragile health systems.
For better perspective, consider the following excerpt from a statement by an international coalition of organizations and individuals concerned with how certain proposals to address the U.S. domestic health worker shortage have “significant potential to worsen international health outcomes,” particularly with respect to the global supply of health workers:
“While the United States enjoys workforce ratios of 8 nurses and 3 doctors for every 1,000 Americans, in Ghana more than 10,000 people have to share a single doctor, and India has less than one nurse for every 1,000 people. Washington, DC, with a population of fewer than 600,000 people, has about twice as many physicians as do the more than 80 million residents of Ethiopia.”
Health worker safety, salaries, benefits and a host of other issues are “push” factors driving health workers to leave the health sector or forcing them to migrate to other regions and countries for better pay and safer work conditions. Additionally, “pull” factors fuel a brain drain to richer nations where higher salaries, stable governments, and better schools are available for health workers and their families.
There have been large increases in development aid over the last decade – though still inadequate – for developing nations, rich nations are part of the problem. Rich nations recruit health workers from lesser developed countries to meet their own growing health demands. It is estimated that 25%, or 200,000, of U.S. physicians were trained overseas and that 60% of those physicians were trained in low to lower-middle income countries. And among nurses, the U.S. nurse workforce now includes 400,000 foreign trained nurses – 16% of the entire nursing workforce. Such drains on developing nation health workforce only further exacerbate widespread shortages and makes it all the more difficult to address endemic and epidemic challenges such as HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, reproductive and maternal child health issues, neglected tropical diseases and so on.
There is much that donor and developing country governments must do to address the health worker crisis and to strengthen health systems, including:
- Supporting robust health workforce plans and providing needed funding
- Funding commitments
- Code on international recruitment of health personnel
- Increasing number of domestically-educated health professionals
- Other relevant activities or developments
The full list of recommendations developed by the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative can be found here.
The U.S. government officials announced in May 2009 a new comprehensive strategy under development that is to be an “integrated approach to fighting diseases, improving health, and strengthening health systems.” In a report released in late October 2009, a broad coalition of advocates and implementers called for a doubling U.S. aid for health and establishing U.S. targets for improved health outcomes. Health workforce plays a prominent and central role in the report.
Eric Williams is a Policy Associate at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a nonprofit that “mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity and justice, and promotes the right to health for all. Harnessing the specialized skills, rigor, and passion of doctors, nurses, public health specialists and scientists, PHR investigates human rights abuses and works to stop them.” Eric is based in PHR’s policy office located in Washington, D.C., but the nonprofit’s primary office is in Cambridge, MA.
PHR chairs the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative (HWAI), which is an international civil society-led coalition affiliated with the Global Health Workforce Alliance. HWAI prioritizes human resources for health and health systems strengthening, and seeks to ensure that people everywhere have access to skilled, motivated and supported health workers within well-functioning health systems.
Emily Bell — Is “brain drain” responsible for the shortage of health workers?
The Who Cares? Campaign Blog is exploring the issues of “brain drain” and attrition for the month of November.
Tanzania faces one of the worst health worker shortages in the world. The country has only 822 doctors and 13,292 nurses who deliver healthcare for almost 40 million people. This means doctor and nurse to patient ratios are 100 and 25 times lower, respectively, than they ought to be to meet basic healthcare needs.
To what extent is this shortage of health workers in Tanzania due to “brain drain” – the phenomenon whereby skilled workers migrate to other places in search of better paying or more satisfying work conditions?
Interestingly, the Touch Foundation report, Catalyzing Change: Molecular Strengthening of the Health System in the Tanzanian Lake Zone, found that external migration of doctors, nurses and other health workers is not as significant a challenge in Tanzania as in other sub-Saharan African countries: “Only 6-15 percent of doctors and less than five percent of nurses in Tanzania emigrate, compared with 37 percent of doctors and 34 percent of nurses in some countries. The low rate of external migration can be attributed to structural factors – political stability, economic growth, and large numbers of ‘paraprofessional’ health workers such as Assistant Medical Officers (AMOs) and Clinical Officers (COs) whose qualifications are not easily transferrable outside Tanzania.”
Despite relatively low rates of external migration, Tanzania faces other challenges with respect to the shortage of health workers. The low production of health workers is a major cause of the shortage. In the Touch Foundation report, Action Now on the Tanzanian Health Workforce Crisis: Expanding Health Worker Training – The Twiga Initiative, we determined there are six major reasons for low production, including a shortage of qualified students and financial support, shortage of clinical faculty, limited non-clinical faculty, fragile clinical and non-clinical (basic science) infrastructure, and overall financial resources.
The small number of new health workers who graduate each year do not always stay in the healthcare profession. Twenty percent of graduates will not enter the workforce at all and many switch careers within the first year of being deployed. Attrition stems from a variety of causes. Those who choose to become health professionals often experience challenging conditions, including low pay, lack of supplies, and poor management. These challenges ultimately lead to low job satisfaction.
The Touch Foundation is planning to address attrition and other challenges facing health workers in the Lake Zone region of 15 million people by creating a regionalized training network to increase capacity and healthcare access in the region. Our work will draw on our in-depth analytical studies on health worker production and health systems challenges as well as our practical experience in supporting Weill Bugando’s medical school and hospital.
Emily Bell is Head of Advocacy and Communications at the Touch Foundation.
Deshka Foster & Stacie Vilendrer — Traditional Healers and Malaria
We had the fortunate experience to conduct research involving traditional healers in Tanzania during the summer of 2007 for our senior honors thesis. We had both been to the country before as HIV/AIDS educators, but conducting research was an entirely different experience – we dealt with strict government research clearance policies, a complicated data-collection protocol, roach-infested rooms, and grueling schedules. Our goal was to explore why caregivers in the Tanga District of Tanzania pursue a particular course of action to deal with malaria in their children. We interviewed female caregivers with children under the age of five, medical professionals, and traditional healers, or waganga wakienyeji as they are called in Swahili.
Malaria has plagued much of the world for thousands of years and remains one of the most prominent global health challenges of our day. In Tanzania, malaria is everywhere: the tearful wails of babies in their mothers’ arms awaiting treatment at hospitals, the rush of Andopheles mosquitoes attacking bare skin in the evenings when the sun begins to set, and poster advertisements for malaria drugs plastered to the walls in every health facility in town. While some children receive malaria medications from biomedical facilities as the World Health Organization recommends, others receive treatment from family members, traditional healers, or do not receive treatment at all.
Studying malaria treatment at the local level in Africa would be incomplete without considering the role of traditional healers, as they represent the first line of care for over 70 percent of the population in Tanzania. A traditional healer may prescribe an array of treatments for a child with malaria including herbal remedies, such as prepared plants or roots, or spiritual remedies, such as exorcism.
From left to right: Stacie, a traditional healer, Deshka, and their translator, Eliakimu
We uncovered several interest findings. Malaria has remained a public health challenge in part because the disease is often difficult to diagnose. Symptoms range from fever, headache, malaise, diarrhoea and vomiting in uncomplicated (simple) malaria to convulsions in complicated (severe) malaria. While about half of the caregiver sample (N=37/61) identified convulsions as a symptom of severe malaria in children, the others reported that convulsions signify a separate disease, distinct from malaria, with its origins in the spiritual world. We gathered a set of Swahili words used to describe convulsions and their associated illness: dege dege, mchango, uchawi, upepo, and zongo. Dege dege and mchango, in particular, had a variety of definitions that reflected spiritual affliction.
Around half of the traditional healers (N=8/18) reinforced a non-biomedical understanding of malarial convulsions:
I know that fever is caused by [a] virus. But when I think it is malaria, I tell the people to go to the hospital… Other times when it is not caused by malaria, it can be caused by demons. When it is demons, I can treat them…I have some drugs that I am using to treat those demons. I call them to talk with them. (Traditional Healer #7)
Remedies described by caregivers ranged from boiled herbs consumed as a tea or used to bathe, to the use of elephant dung, indigenous hens, and spiritual and religious rituals:
For mchango, traditional healers take garlic peels and they mix with elephant waste and they heat the garlic peels. Then they take a piece of kanga [cloth] and cover the baby so that the smoke can spread it in the body of the baby. If you use the first treatment and it fails, there are other traditional treatments that you can use like the leaves of the plant over there [she points to a bush across the yard]. We scratch the leaves and mix with water and then we wash the baby in the water of the leaves from the plant from over there. (Caregiver #17)
Despite these seemingly archaic forms of treatment that some caregivers and traditional healers reported, traditional healers also reported a notable commitment to working alongside the biomedical community. Thirteen of the 18 traditional healers interviewed reported sending patients to biomedical facilities for malaria testing, even if they ultimately intended to treat them with traditional remedies:
Many come here first. I can treat the symptoms, but I send them to the hospital to test first and then I treat them. It is most important that people go and get tested early enough. (Traditional healer #15)
A lack of education about the disease and its full range of symptoms may be a primary reason that caregivers may choose traditional healing over a biomedical facility. A significant public health challenge is to incorporate information connecting malaria and convulsions (rather than simply high fever) into malaria media campaigns to promote behavior change. Shortages in doctors, nurses, and other health workers exacerbate the problem, as caregivers often have no other option than to turn to traditional methods for treating malaria.
Traditional healers play an important role in their communities and may provide certain health benefits to their patients. However, it seems that misunderstanding about malaria, emphasized by some traditional healers, is contributing to deaths. In this study, an alarming 8 percent of the caregivers interviewed had a child die from malaria. In addition, traditional healers are in a unique position to dispense not only treatment but also education to their immediate communities. As traditional healers adapt to new roles in a changing healthcare structure, they may become an important resource for malaria information. The Tanga AIDS Working Group based in Tanga, Tanzania has achieved this type of collaboration for HIV/AIDS educating hundreds of traditional healers on the biology of the disease as well as prevention and treatment options.
We are encouraged to see interest in these issues and welcome questions and comments.
Habari – Liz Pavlovich: News from Bugando
Nyassatu Ramadhani Mwendwa, MD Student at Weill Bugando
“I believe I am a psychiatrist” Nyassatu tells me. Why a psychiatrist? “Because I believe everything starts in the mind. Everything good, everything bad starts in the mind. And when people have wellbeing in the mind they can do something better.”
Nyassatu’s name means tilapia, an abundant fish found in nearby Lake Victoria; and her story, full of insights and moving accounts of struggle, flowed as easily as a fish negotiating the water’s currents. Recently I have had the pleasure of talking to many students like Nyassatu, a student only two days away from starting her very first day of medical school at Bugando University College of Health Sciences in Tanzania.
One person’s story can tell you so much about an issue so difficult to explain to people thousands of miles away and from different cultures, surroundings and circumstances could ever fully comprehend. We are so often caught up in digesting a problem such as world hunger, HIV/AIDS or internal conflict in terms of facts and figures that the people behind those unfeeling numbers are often overlooked. But individuals like Nyassatu are the heart of the issue – they are the true beneficiaries of support from organizations such as the Touch Foundation in Tanzania.
By speaking with Nyassatu and other students, professors and health professionals, we can measure our impact in more substantial and emotive terms. We can learn about how we enable people to fulfill their ambitions, serve within their communities, and help them go forward as an individual and a society. As Nyassatu says about herself and her classmates at Bugando, “We are the ones who are going to change the society and help the society. And we need changes in order to move a step, another step forward [into the future]. We need to change our minds and think something new.”
I know that this change is possible because there are so many driven and compassionate students determined to complete their studies at this Tanzanian university. And associating the future’s doctors such as Nyassatu with the incredible number of lives they will save will not miss the fact that we also helped them to reach their personal dreams.
Habari – News From Bugando – is a periodic blog posting by Liz Pavlovich, a Program Officer for the Touch Foundation who is based in Mwanza Tanzania. Since 2004, the Touch Foundation (www.touchfoundation.org) has been working with Tanzanian partners to address the health worker shortage by expanding the Bugando regional medical training college and teaching hospital. Bugando’s University is the second largest of five institutions training medical doctors in the country. It also trains health workers in seven other disciplines – post-graduate MDs, nurses, assistant medical officers, radiographers, pharmacists and laboratory technologists. The school is now training 900 students.
Dr. Donald Catino — Investigating the evidence for herbal traditional medicine
I am an an internist and have done a medical literature search 1950 to 2009, gathering nearly 100 articles which give objective evidence of the efficacy of these herbs in a wide variety of diseases: HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, other parasitic diseases, and common bacterial infections, as well as diabetes, asthma, seizures, thrombosis, estrogen deficiency and even dental caries and periodontal disease.
Most of the current evidence is in vitro laboratory testing, but some animal, and a few human studies have been done. I will be presenting this evidence to the Weill Bugando medical staff on Oct. 21. My goal is to begin to convince the medical staff of the value of Herbal Traditional Medicine, and to begin to forge a working relationship between the hospital physicians and the local healers.
Mutual understanding, education and respect, followed by mutual patient consultation, and eventually cooperative clinical research are the long term goals.
Dr Donald Catino and his wife Pamela are visiting again and continuing their interests in Herbal Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. Dr. Catino has been practicing medicine for more than 45 years.
Liz Pavlovich — Switching places: traditional and western medicine
Echinacea, ginger root tea, acupuncture – all considered legitimate treatments by many people nowadays. But on the flip side of things, there can be a tendency to belittle the traditional medicine and traditional healers in non-western countries as reminiscent of the “backwards” lifestyle and health care. In Africa, where up to 80% of the population uses traditional medicine as the primary form of health services and access to western health services is absurdly low, this perception helps no one.
Reconciling where we should stand on traditional medicine is difficult for social and cultural reasons. It can also be frustrating for practical reasons, such the dire need for more doctors, nurses and pharmacists who are trained primarily in western methods to halt the spread of diseases like malaria that can be treated easily with the correct regime of modern medicines. But a symbiotic relationship between the two methods that promotes the best of both worlds is possible.
Local populations are apt to listen to traditional healers – these skilled persons are respected by their communities as a way to treat ailments of a natural or supernatural nature. They will persist as the voice and mind of those they serve. We therefore need to be able to work with traditional healers so that positive change can be realized. This means open exchanges between the two groups to break down stigmas and eliminate some of the conclusively harmful practices. Hope lies in the fact that some organizations and African governments have already created courses to educate traditional healers on prevention and detection of HIV/AIDS. These healers are now agents of positive change to help stop the spread of this pandemic.
My work with the Touch Foundation in Tanzania to support a university that trains doctors and other health workers is not in spite of traditional medicine. Part of our mission to give people greater choice and knowledge, more confidence in health facilities as they become better staffed and equipped, and a much needed improvement to quality of life.
Liz Pavlovich is a Program Officer at the Touch Foundation and is based in Mwanza, Tanzania.
Emily Bell — Traditional vs Western Medicine in Tanzania
Photo courtesy of PBS
The Who Cares? Blog theme for October is traditional versus western medicine.
The vast majority of Tanzanians have never seen a doctor. In part, this is due to the extreme shortage of doctors (one doctor per 30,000 people), transportation challenges and other issues of access. Another important factor is that many Tanzanians – particularly those in rural areas – rely on traditional healers or “witch doctors.”
Why do people turn to traditional healers? It is partly a matter of cultural and religious traditions, but may also be due to lack of alternative medical choices. For some individuals, it is not an “either or” choice. They might consult a traditional healer first and ultimately seek care from a medical clinic when their symptoms do not go away.
The consequences of delaying medical care can be dire. According to a recent article by PBS, “Deaths at Birth Highlight Tanzania’s Healthcare Challenges,” one woman and six infants die each hour due to birth-related complications. Without access to medical care, many women give birth in their homes, relying on traditional healers or health workers with little training. If anything goes wrong, the health consequences can be dire. In response, the government is providing medical training to traditional healers. An article in The New York Times pointed out the importance of respecting cultural traditions when considering how those advocating western medical interventions might collaborate with traditional healers. The article highlighted an effective childbirth program in Peru that respected local traditions.
In a Touch Foundation study on the Tanzanian health systems, focus groups consisting of health workers, traditional healers and patients explored several issues, including traditional health services. Participants noted that skilled health workers should educate traditional birth attendants on prevention of disease and danger signs so that traditional birth attendants know when to refer patients to a medical facility. Simple interventions such as provision of sterilized delivery kits and clean knives for circumcision can also have positive health impact.
While community reliance on traditional healers can result in delayed or poor care, researchers are also studying traditional healing practices to determine which remedies might produce positive outcomes that can be scientifically proven.
For example, in Tanzania, the World Bank is supporting the Tanga AIDS Working Group, which is a partnership between doctors and traditional healers who have developed treatments for AIDS-related opportunistic infection. The group has “treated over 4,000 AIDS patients with herbs prescribed by local healers. The impact has been most significant in alleviating the opportunistic diseases brought on by the AIDS virus. The patients who have responded most positively have lived longer, by up to five years.” UNAIDS described their work as “an outstanding example of how positive results can be achieved in the fight against AIDS by using local, culturally relevant expertise and resources to provide low-cost care and prevention for people living with AIDS.”
Emily Bell is Head of Advocacy and Communications at the Touch Foundation.
Emily Bell — Touch Foundation Proud to Serve in Partnership with President Kikwete
Last week, we were thrilled to have His Excellency President Jakaya Kikwete at a dinner co-hosted by the Touch Foundation and Barrick Gold. The occasion – which drew a diverse group of leaders from the public and private sector – underscored the importance of our blog’s theme this month: government and NGO partnership.
At the dinner on Sept 23, President Kikwete, who was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, remarked:
“We are very appreciative of the support of Touch Foundation. So I came here to say thank you, Touch Foundation. I came here to tell all of you, to ask all of you to continue to assist Touch Foundation. Build the capacity so that they can help us…Train the doctors who are going to save so many lives – the women who are in need, the children who are dying of malaria, the many people who are dying of diseases that can be cured, diseases that can be eliminated.”
President Kikwete has been a vital partner for the Touch Foundation. His support for our work has enabled Touch to work closely with Tanzanian partners to train hundreds of new health workers and to lay the groundwork for improved healthcare services.
We salute the President’s efforts to expand access to healthcare in his own country as well as his leadership on healthcare in Africa. He has also become a critical partner to the US. An AllAfrica.com article this week noted that Tanzania “has emerged as East Africa’s star player on the US pitch.”
The Touch Foundation will be posting video excerpts and a full write up on the Sept 23 dinner on our website shortly. In addition to President Kikwete, participants included Ray Chambers, Special Envoy to the UN Secretary General for Malaria; Ambassador Eric Goosby, US Global AIDS Coordinator; Rajat Gupta, Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the UN and former Chair of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria; H. E. Augustine Mahiga, Permanent Representative of Tanzania to the UN; and Honorable Prof. David Mwakyusa, Tanzania’s Minister of Health and Social Welfare.
FOR FULL WRITE-UP ON THE EVENT, READ THIS ARTICLE ON OUR TOUCH FOUNDATION WEBSITE.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW SHORT VIDEO OF PRESIDENT KIKWETE AT TOUCH FOUNDATION EVENT.
Emily Bell is Head of Advocacy and Communications at the Touch Foundation.