Untapped Human Resources: Volunteer Mentoring/Capacity Building

Recent world events have demonstrated that local health disparities have many new facets influenced by factors within and outside a country. Communicable and non-communicable diseases are now part of the new public health landscape in African countries. The presence of quality local professionals is key. The workforce spectrum has now been expanded into a much broader range of public health disciplines. The challenge for the Human Resource/Workforce Strategy for African countries is how to meet this new agenda.

Government takes the lead role in restructuring and improving national training institutions; their resources are very limited. Continuing education and on-the-job training of existing staff are almost non-existent.

To help address this challenge, the non-government sector from other countries can assist Africa’s governments with targeted mentoring and coaching performed by recently retired professionals who volunteer their time, talent and network of contacts. African countries are a unique testing ground for this concept because independence occurred in the early 1960’s. Many older public health professionals, both from countries in other regions as well as African are now becoming the first cohort of “retired public health professionals with global public health expertise”.  

Encore Service Corps International was established to mobilize the 200,000 former US Peace Corps Volunteers to contribute their time, expertise and professional network of contacts, to help younger colleagues in developing countries improve their capacity to carry out specific tasks that would better enable their organization to meet its goals. A number of public health assignments have been implemented in Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon, with other discussions for Ethiopia and Rwanda.  WHO country representatives and  Geneva staff have been involved in consultation. All have been financed with private sector funds.

The presentation will identify the potential, discuss several case studies, review the success/failures of a variety of assignments that ranged from 3-9 months.