Touch has been growing since 2004 to address Tanzania’s health worker crisis and health system deficit. What began as a grass-roots effort has evolved into an organizational key partner of the Tanzanian government undertaking health system restructure in Tanzania.

Our work is a continuation of the efforts begun by the Catholic Church in the early 1990s, which delivers nearly twenty percent of Tanzania’s health care. Recognizing the urgent need for more Tanzanian doctors, the Church helped the government to establish the country’s fourth medical college, Bugando University College of Health Sciences, or BUCHS. Bishop Aloysius Balina, Chairman of the adjacent Bugando Medical Center (BMC) – Tanzania’s second-largest hospital, servicing a third of the nation’s population – spearheaded the project and became dual Chairman of both institutions.

To help raise funds for the medical school, Bishop Balina turned to Maryknoll priest and medical doctor Father Dr. Peter Le Jacq, who had been working in the Bugando Medical Center for over a decade. Father Peter then began an extraordinary grass-roots fundraising effort, calling on friends and family to support the cause.

With significant financial and in-kind contributions from the Citi Foundation, Weill-Cornell Medical College and AMERICARES, and Sandy Weill, then Chairman of Citigroup and Chairman of the Board at Weill-Cornell Medical College, the fundraising effort soon outgrew the capacity of Maryknoll.

The leaders of this effort then approached McKinsey & Company, the global management strategy consulting firm, which confirmed the need for and subsequently helped to design an independent, secular foundation to assist developing countries to expand pre-service training of skilled health care workers across all cadres.

Since our inception in 2004, we have been working with Weill Bugando, the pinnacle health worker training and patient care facility in the Lake Zone region of Tanzania. Weill Bugando includes the Bugando University College of Health Sciences (BUCHS), a multidisciplinary health training center with over 700 students, and Bugando Medical Centre (BMC), the largest hospital in the western half of Tanzania.

Read some of our accomplishments to date at Weill Bugando.

Through our work at BUCHS, we have also learned that the clinical component of health worker training depends upon the functionality of the health care facilities and systems in which the students will learn and ultimately go on to practice. Based on this knowledge, we have begun to support expansion and improvement of health practice at BMC, are assisting the Tanzanian health ministry with an assessment of the national healthworker training system, and are beginning an initiative that will delve into the regional Lake Zone health system.