IntraHealth has worked in South Africa to help the country strengthen its health workforce and presservice education systems. Most recently, we partnered with the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI) to strengthen nursing education systems and increase the number, quality, and relevance of nursing and midwifery graduates through the CapacityPlus project.

We piloted health worker preservice education costing approach and instruments at the medical and nursing schools of Walter Sisulu University, a historically disadvantaged institution in rural South Africa that is renowned for successfully educating and placing graduates in rural and underserved areas. The costing approach and instruments estimate the cost of producing a health professional school graduate, and the incremental additional costs of implementing different sets of interventions to scale up preservice education. Based on the pilot experience, the approach and instruments were revised and used to conduct costing studies in additional countries supported by the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI).