UCSF wins grant to address health worker shortage in Tanzania

The University of California, San Francisco has won a $7.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help address the shortage of health-care workers in Tanzania, in East Africa. As reported in San Francisco Business Times, The two-year grant will support a collaboration between UCSF Global Health Sciences and Tanzania’s Muhimbili University of Health Allied Sciences, that nation’s only public university of health sciences, to develop and implement strategies for Dar es Salaam-based Muhimbili and other African institutions to meet their countries’ health workforce needs.

Solving sub-Saharan Africa’s health-care worker shortage has long been a priority for governments, universities and international organizations, according to the two universities, who say Tanzania’s leaders recognize the need to educate and train more health-care workers. The partnership aims to develop an “institutional partnership model” that can be replicated in other low-resource settings.

In early December, UCSF announced a $4 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support planning for a potential systemwide UC School of Global Health. The proposed school, which the university envisions as training new leaders to help tackle global health issues, would be UC’s first multicampus, systemwide school, the university said.