Main description:

The higher education policies across the globe emphasised the need for strong leadership and good governance, significant investments, public-private partnerships, and industry cooperation to achieve economic growth and a competitive edge. The book brings together overviews and country-level work on six major economic and institutional challenges to policy makers: (1) governance of health education organisations and systems, (2) approaches to financing the education of health workers, (3) the special nature of capital investment in expanding the capacity of health education institutions; (4) equity in accessing health education, with a special focus on issues arising fin private approaches to health worker education; (5) public-private partnerships, and (6) the role of technology as a game changer in health worker education and possibilities for leapfrogging.

Based on World Bank research, the book provides an assessment of the resource envelope likely to be available to the health and education sectors by 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also discussed are some of the international regional efforts to align, transregional standards and to raise the quality of higher education to fill contemporary needs.

The authors discuss new or overlooked issues related to scaling up health education such as capital investment, health education financing, and the role of the private sector. In many countries, the binding constraint to scaling up health education is not only the sector's limited absorptive capacity to hire the trained personnel but also its limited resources to devote to training and needed capital investments to expand of institutional capacity to train more graduates. In a number of countries, the cost of educating the additional health workforce would outstrip the annual higher education budgets of the Ministries of Education. Furthermore, many countries trying to scale up health education also need to consider parallel measures to ensure that the secondary education system produces enough graduates to feed a scaling up of health education.

The authors present in-depth case studies of five Sub-Saharan countries' health human resources strategies with a focus on education.