Health Workers

El Salvador’s Ministry of Health has 111 warehouses nationwide, and only two are directed by women. Yesenia Aguirre de Barahona is one of those two women, working as a warehouse guard in the Paracentral Region. Her warehouse supplies medicines to 73 health centers that serve a total of 882,243 people.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, she gained 23 years of experience working in the supply chain of the country’s health system, and spent seven years as a guard of medication warehouses. Even though she is highly experienced, she faces some challenges due to being a woman in a role typically held by men. Read more »

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

One of the things I like best about my job at IntraHealth International is that I’ve been able to incorporate photography into my work to support health workers around the world. Recently I was overjoyed to see one of my photos included in an article about frontline health workers in the Huffington Post. Here’s the story behind the photo. Read more »

“We have done it before, we are doing it now, and we will do it again,” announced Samuel Ngobua, chief of party for CapacityPlus/Nigeria, during a scholarship award ceremony on August 13. The event marked the second scholarship award—this time to 1,200 midwifery students from 54 schools in 30 states!

The scholarship scheme is one of the interventions CapacityPlus is implementing to address low production of quality midwives and community health workers in Nigeria. A baseline assessment in September 2012 showed that financial difficulties caused a high number of students to drop out of their programs while other students pulled out until they had funds to continue. In February 2013, CapacityPlus awarded the first scholarships to 874 students in their final year of studying to become midwives and community health extension workers in two states, Edo and Benue. Read more »

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

Garden City University College is a private nursing school in Kumasi, Ghana, where I spent six weeks this summer assessing the school’s progress toward improving its management practices. During my time at Garden City, I heard from several people that Ghana’s government is reluctant to work with private schools, and concerned that private schools are training subpar nurses.

Hearing this—both from members of the public and from people within the private school—was discouraging. Ghana is one of 57 countries that have a significant shortage of health workers¹. In Ghana there are only about 10 nurses and midwives and one physician for every 10,000 people—numbers that fall far below the World Health Organization’s recommendations. Public institutions cannot fill the gap on their own. Read more »