About Us
KNUST is one of eight initial partners of the Africa Higher Education Collaborative in Health and aims to contribute to all three pillars of the health strategy; Health Employment, Health Entrepreneurship and Health Ecosystems. This includes building an empowered health workforce, with a particular focus on women, and building an entrepreneurial ecosystem that advances skills, knowledge, and mindsets in order to launch and sustain health ventures. These programs will contribute to the advancement and attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 17 in Ghana and across Africa.
The Opportunity & Challenge
The health sector’s success is critical to Ghana achieving the SDGs, especially SDG3, which aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” The government has demonstrated support for the expansion and improvement of the health sector through both infrastructure commitments and systems changes. For example, strengthening the Primary Health Care (PHC) system and its delivery by building 111 new health care facilities through “Agenda 111”, as well as a scaling up Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) across the country. As part of this agenda, the government is supporting KNUST by completing the building of the first phase of a Teaching Hospital. However, Ghana’s health sector continues to be confronted with human capital challenges, especially a mismatch between the demand for health and the supply of health workforce. This is evident with the lack of:- Skilled health care workers, especially in critical clinical services, such as emergency and palliative care, Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD’s) and timely responses to epidemic-prone diseases, which has significantly limited the standard of care. Additionally, there’s a lack of women in leadership positions limiting advocacy for women’s health needs;
- Relevant university degree programs mainly in Public Health (details below), to promote the health sector and equip young people with the capabilities needed to advance evidence-based practices;
- Entrepreneurs equipped to innovate within the sector, especially women who face additional barriers in accessing entrepreneurship training, mentorship and financial resources.
These human capital constraints remain one of the major threats to the attainment of SDG 3 and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) (Asamani et al., 2021). Yet there is huge opportunity for building and scaling human capital within the health sector, (for the details of target population, including women and girls with disabilities, vulnerable populations including those displaced (refugee camps) see section 3g), outlined in our approach below.
The Approach
Working closely with partners, we propose a series of programs to support the development of an empowered health workforce in Ghana. Specifically, we intend to:
- Identify and address critical skills gaps in the health sector, including improving the quality-of-service delivery, especially with respect to patient experiences;
- Strengthen hospitals, through enhanced human capital development, in their capacity to deliver especially in the area of emergency services, and palliative care;
- Enhance the capacity and functionality of the frontline health systems (CHPS, Health Centres, Maternity Homes);
- Scale up digital health solutions by improving access, ensuring availability and competitive price of health technologies;
- Create more sustainable and scalable health-related enterprises and work opportunities;
- Increase investment in the health sector through business expansions and new business start-ups as a result of the tailor-made entrepreneurial awareness creation and training programs;
- Increase and improve public-private partnerships in the health sector delivery;
- Create an ecosystem of health research networks that feed into a niche for health entrepreneurships;
- Expand community and civil society engagement to strengthen the capacity to deal with disease outbreak.
Collaborative’s Strategic Objectives
KNUST is one of eight initial partners of the Africa Higher Education Collaborative in Health and aims to contribute to all three pillars of the health strategy; Health Employment, Health Entrepreneurship and Health Ecosystems. This includes building an empowered health workforce, with a particular focus on women, and building an entrepreneurial ecosystem that advances skills, knowledge, and mindsets in order to launch and sustain health ventures. These programs will contribute to the advancement and attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 17 in Ghana and across Africa.
The health employment pillar aims to expand and improve current capacities to train primary healthcare workers.
The health entrepreneurship pillar aims to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and culture that supports entrepreneurs to create meaningful innovations and employment opportunities in the health sector.