The Touch Foundation is building a model for health system strengthening and health workforce expansion in Africa. We are currently focusing our efforts in Tanzania, a nation experiencing one of the most severe health care worker shortages and system deficits in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our objective is to enable Tanzanians to produce adequate numbers of health workers and implement high priority health system improvements. While working in Tanzania to develop and implement an effective approach, we are committed to collecting, codifying, and disseminating the knowledge generated by our work so that it can be replicated elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We are an implementing partner who:

• Utilizes a rigorous problem solving and fact-based model of a professional services firm to determine strategy and implementation on a case-by-case basis with reference to real on-the-ground constraints and opportunities
  
• Build trust-based relationships with Tanzanian partners at local, regional and national levels
  
• Provides integrative management capacity in the areas where we work, including contribution of in-country staff that collaborate with and develop local leaders, provide oversight, technical, and business expertise, and ensure local ownership
  
• Acts as a catalyst to engage and convene other partners in both strategy development and implementation
• Provides tracking and accountability to ensure transparency, and
  
• Works on disease specific issues in the context of the broader health system
  
• Creates, codifies and propagates acquired knowledge to governments, global public health, medical and donor communities.
  

We have applied this approach within our inaugural program at Weill Bugando, the pinnacle health training and health provision facility in the Lake Zone. Weill Bugando includes the Bugando University College of Health Sciences (BUCHS), a multidisciplinary health training center now with over 750 students, and Bugando Medical Centre (BMC), a 850-bed tertiary care and teaching hospital. Read more about our work at Weill Bugando, the expanding the national healthworker training network, and the broader health system work of which Weill Bugando is an integral component.