The world remains woefully unaware of Africa's healthcare workforce crisis. The impact of this crisis – high disease burden, high mortality rates of mothers and infants and low life expectancies – may be well known around the globe. But the appalling fact that many African countries have only handful of doctors, nurses and other health workers surprises most people outside of the health community.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa has a critical deficit of more than 1 million health service providers and management support workers. While the region has 11 percent of the world's population and 24 percent of the global burden of disease, it has only 3 percent of the world's health workers.

 

This extremely low ratio of health workers to population is a direct cause of the high disease burden and the resulting public health problems. Without prompt action, the ratio of health workers to population will continue to decline in Africa, and the deadly public health impacts will continue to rise.

 

The mission of the Africa Health Workforce Observatory iAHWO) is to support actions that address HRH challenges urgently through promoting, developing and sustaining a firm knowledge base for HRH information that is founded on solid and updated HRH information, reliable analysis and effective use at subnational, national and regional levels.

 

 

Principles and values

 

As the health workforce field involves multiple sectors (education, labour, civil service, etc.) and legitimate stakeholders (ministries of health, academia, professional associations, NGOs, regional institutions, etc.), the observatory should acknowledge the relative importance and role of these stakeholders and promote their participation to ensure common understanding of issues and consensus on priorities and cooperation for effective implementation.

 

The observatory should also be guided by the recognition that the development of health workforce policies is a dynamic and continuous process based on a continuously renewed understanding between stakeholders. Therefore, the development of human resources policies and the negotiation process implies and should be based on the best available evidence, the production of relevant information and promotion of transparency and trust.

 

As many forces that affect human resources in a national system are common to other countries or are international in nature, the HRH observatory should recognize the impact of globalization and the economic and social integration process on the HRH development in order to inform itself and influence the international initiatives and experience.