A Multipartite University Partnership Model for Establishing a Graduate Public Health Education Program In Namibia In the Era of HIV/AIDS: A Critical Review of Strategies and Challenges at the Inception Stage

The establishment of graduate public health (PH) education to address the severe shortage of PH manpower and mitigate the spread of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is a noticeable trend of our era. Illustrative of this trend is a request for proposals (RFPs) released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2008 (CDC-RFA-PS09-908) and targeting Namibia, one of the three countries most-affected in the world (overall 20% HIV prevalence rate among sexually active adults). Following the review of proposals submitted under this competition, it is expected that only one proposal will be selected and implemented, leaving many other proposals sealed under the veil of secrecy and likely unexploited forever regardless of their potentially very promising ideas. This is a pity state of affairs in a world where creative ideas are in short supply to advance global PH. We argue in favor of voluntary lifting of such secrecy as a crucial step for the overall benefit of global PH. In this vein, to stimulate cross pollination and to offer an exemplar, we discuss the dynamic inception stage of a program three American universities proposed under the aforementioned RFPs. We systematically present and analyze the strategies used, efforts deployed, challenges faced and lessons learnt in exploring the key attributes of the Namibian health care system and HIV epidemic, enlisting the collaboration of and dividing work among American and Namibian university partners, integrating core PH competencies and HIV mitigation related knowledge, practices and attitudes in the proposed graduate PH curricula, and combining face-to-face and online teaching formats.