Human Rights

East Africa – School of Nursing and Midwifery

Countries in East Africa suffer from a drastic shortage of healthcare providers, especially in the rural regions. For example, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda currently have desperately few nurses and midwives to serve their populations. In many communities in developing countries, nurses do what doctors would do if they were available: treat wounds and illnesses, prescribe medications, set bones, bandage sprains, and deliver babies. But there are far too few nurses available to serve these countries’ populations.

Aga Khan University (AKU) School of Nursing and Midwifery was created to upgrade the qualifications of working nurses from the designation Enrolled Nurse to that of Registered Nurse and from Registered Nurse to the Bachelor of Science in Nursing level. The skills taught in these university programs are desperately needed to meet the health needs of the region.

Enhancing the Student Experience – Nursing and Midwifery

In 2012, AWB undertook a project to enhance the quality of nursing education at the AKU School of Nursing and Midwifery, East Africa, through a faculty-development program that promotes student engagement in the learning process.

The volunteers assisted faculty members in several ways:

  • Increasing their use of student-centred education, discipline, and evaluation mechanisms
  • Lesson planning, in-class observation, and co-teaching
  • Launching a comprehensive faculty-development plan
  • Developing a new curriculum, research planning and design, and student feedback and faculty-evaluation mechanisms

Thanks to the success of the first phase of this project, AKU asked the volunteers, Marilyn Chapman and Pammla Petrucka, to return, extending the project to the summer of 2015.

Upgrading Faculty Research Skills – Nursing and Midwifery

Marilyn Chapman returned to AKU in Nairobi for two subsequent working visits in 2013 and 2014, focusing primarily on helping faculty members use learner-centred and interactive teaching strategies. The project also involved overseeing the development of the curriculum for an innovative, inter-professional undergraduate program – a collaborative project between the nursing and medical nursing studies programs. Marilyn also continued her work with AKU faculty in helping them write articles based on research projects undertaken in 2012.

Pammla Petrucka also continued her role as a faculty mentor, focusing on expanding the research capacity of AKU faculty members. In November 2013, she made a working visit to AKU in Dar es Salaam, and in May 2014 she returned to work on each of AKU’s three East African campuses. In addition to continuing her work mentoring faculty members, she worked with the faculty’s senior leadership on the faculty development plan and the expansion of the nursing program.

Date: 2012-2018

Volunteers:

  • Pammla Petrucka, Associate Professor, the College of Nursing, University of Saskatchewan, Regina, Saskatchewan
  • Marilyn Chapman,, Retired Professor, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia
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Colombia – Strengthening university health research collaborations with Indigenous health organizations

In Colombia, researchers and Indigenous communities lay the foundation for ethical data sharing and collaboration

Indigenous communities, who have long struggled to protect their land, knowledge and culture from exploitation, are now staking a claim to their health data as a necessary step on the path to better healthcare.

Many Indigenous health organizations are hindered by a lack of data collection and management capacity, which limits their ability to develop relevant programs, measure their success and secure much-needed funding.

It’s a cycle that AWB volunteer Javier Mignone of the University of Manitoba is helping to break. In 2019, AWB supported a project at the Universidad de Antioquia (U de A), in Medellin, Colombia, to create a framework for ethical collaboration between researchers and Indigenous organizations as they build their health information systems.

In Colombia, Indigenous peoples make up 2.5% of the population. Poverty and marginalization, already heavy burdens on their health and well-being, are exacerbated by climate change and conflicts over land. Children in particular suffer from preventable diseases and chronic malnutrition.

In some parts of the country, Indigenous healthcare organizations provide a safety net. Nevertheless, even the most successful organizations have trouble finding funding in Colombia’s highly privatized health sector, especially for research and evaluation.

Javier and his counterparts at the U de A’s faculty of public health organized two week-long workshops that included faculty, students and representatives of Indigenous health authorities.

people sitting around a large table in a classroom

Dean and instructors of the Facultad Nacional de Salud Publica, Universidad de Antioquia, meeting with workshop participants from Toribio

Specifically, the Indigenous-run municipality of Toribio, which serves the Nasa people, was seeking support from U de A to create a data repository and a Health Situation Room–a data visualization platform.

Based on the success of the first workshop, the second one welcomed members of Anas Wayuu, a large not-for-profit health insurance company that covers the northern region of La Guajira, home to the Wayuu.

The company, which already provides access to a wide variety of services, was exploring the creation of a data repository to strengthen its capacity to produce evidence to guide programs.

groups of people looking up at the camera from below

Workshop participants during closing event of the May 2019 workshop

Participants established guidelines to govern U de A’s research collaborations with Indigenous organizations and developed ethical data sharing agreements and data management plans between U de A, University of Manitoba and the municipality of Toribio. Participants also adapted First Nations’ ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP) principles to their own context.

The workshops were an important step towards the creation of new health information systems for organizations that serve the Nasa and Wayuu peoples. “Considering that for our organization it is important to have exact information, (the workshop) helped me to have a much clearer notion about the issues,” said one participant.

In the meantime, Universidad de Antioquia is in a position to work with Indigenous health organizations on an equal footing.

Thanks to the new collaboration framework, future research partnerships with Indigenous organizations will be built on trust and a shared goal: the realization of the right to health for Colombia’s Indigenous peoples.


Date: 2019

Volunteer: Javier Mignone, PhD, professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, Max Rady College of Medicine, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba


Thank you to the Djavad Mowafaghian Foundation for making this project possible.

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