Education
Sub-Saharan Africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden, yet only 3 percent of the world’s health care workers.
— Mitchell Besser, physician and founder of mothers2mothers, a nonprofit that helps prevent HIV transmission, Cape Town, South Africa
Scholarships
A shortage of trained health workers in many developing countries jeopardizes lives and compromises people’s health, especially in rural areas. The World Health Organization (WHO) underscored this shortage in 2006, with the following summary:
“A shortage estimated at almost 4.3 million doctors, midwives, nurses, and support workers worldwide is most severe in the poorest countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where they are most needed.”
In 2020, WHO notes, there are about 8 times as many people for every nurse or midwife in Africa as in the Americas or Europe. The same is true of doctors. A scarcity of well-prepared health workers directly impacts access to a healthy life for millions of people.
Global Health Ministries (GHM) partners with local leaders to identify scholarship candidates to raise up as future medical professionals, health leaders or for advanced specialty training. We also network with leaders to identify appropriate educational opportunities (usually in the region where they live).
Each year GHM is raising up literally hundreds of health leaders of all levels, from Community Health Workers to nurses, midwives, pharmacists, doctors, and healthcare administrator, including health professionals like Winnie, at the center of the photo above. A young Maasai woman, Winnie is celebrating her graduation as a nurse in Tanzania. She was the first in her family to continue her education, made possible with a scholarship from GHM.
Meet Nuwayina
As the eldest child in a Nigerian family, Nuwayina Briska was responsible for looking after her younger siblings. She grew to have a passion for mentoring and caring for others, and after completing a degree in Health Education from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, returned to Nigeria where she serves as the Health Education Coordinator for the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria, Health Services. In 2019 Nuwayina graduated with a Master of Arts Degree in Applied Community Development from the Future Generations Graduate School, a “global learning organization with expertise in community grounded sustainable development.” A grant made possible by GHM and the ELCA enabled Nuwayina to participate in this program.
Nuwayina is a trainer of trainers, using her skills and knowledge to train and deploy Village Health Workers in her native Nigeria, where together they are making change happen.
Meet Benazhir
Benazhir grew up in Betroka, a rural community in southern Madagascar. He saw that people in his community faced many challenges, and it became his desire to help people who are sick. A scholarship from GHM enabled Benazhir to complete his training at SEFAM, the Lutheran School of Nursing in Madagascar. Today he is a nurse at Ejeda Hospital, where he has served in both the in-patient wards and as a surgical nurse.
In 2019 Benazhir completed additional training as a radiology technician. Like many mission hospitals, Ejeda was without a working x-ray machine, severely limiting the hospital’s capacity to diagnose and treat patients. In 2019 GHM shipped a new digital x-ray to Ejeda, a critically important piece of medical equipment for any hospital. But the equipment alone cannot help people who are sick. Benazhir’s skills as a trained radiology technician, and as a nurse, help make the hospital’s life-saving work possible.
