Lack of health workers imperils Africa's gains, UN agency warns

An emerging "crisis of health manpower" in Africa threatens to derail the continent's progress, according to experts attending a United Nations-sponsored meeting that concluded today in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Officials from 17 African countries, who took part in the conference sponsored by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, agreed that the problem stems from unsuitable training programmes, inadequate cooperation among the many parties concerned, and losses of staff to opportunities outside Africa.

These factors combine to render Africa's health care facilities "barely able to function for lack of qualified, motivated doctors, nurses and other health workers," WHO said in a statement.

The AIDS epidemic is exacerbating the situation by further reducing the availability of trained health workers because of staff deaths and by increasing the demand for care, according to participants at the meeting, which opened on 29 January.

Addressing participants, Dr. Ok Pannenborg, who oversees the World Bank's work on health in Africa, placed the lack of African doctors and nurses in the global context of an increasingly flexible labour market, which facilitates the migration of skilled manpower to other countries.

According to WHO, the issue is gaining greater urgency amid such dramatic events as the recruitment by a European country of an entire graduating nursing class in one African country. The UN agency warned that without "urgent action there is a risk that the contributions soon to be committed in Africa by the new Global Fund to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria will not even have a serious possibility of achieving their goals."