Last month,  Adam Ross, the program examiner in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, visited the Kibagabaga Hospital in Kigali, Rwanda, on his first visit to Africa since taking over the Global Health and Child Survival portfolio eight months ago,

Last fall IntraHealth International Program Officer Marsha Hamilton visited the Fistula Care Center in Ethiopia and noticed a tattered and confusing poster that the staff was using to diagnose obstetric fistula. Obstetric fistula is a hole that forms between a woman’s rectum and vagina or between her bladder and vagina as a result of complicated or prolonged childbirth without appropriate obstetric care.

The IntraHealth International-led Capacity Kenya project will honor local health workers next month with the Health Professional of the Year awards, which are designed to promote excellence, strengthen capacity, and recognize professionalism in health care provision.   Nominees—from public, private, and faith-based health facilities nationwide—will be selected by their peers.

At a regional meeting in Monrovia, Liberia in May, the West African Health Organization (WAHO) presented promising results from a pilot of the iHRIS Manage software in the Northern region of Ghana. iHRIS Manage is a software package that enables an organization to design and manage a comprehensive human resources strategy, which was developed by the Capacity Project and supported by CapacityPlus, both led by IntraHealth International.

Ambassador Dr. Eric Goosby, of the Office of the US Global AIDS coordinator, along with the US ambassador to Tanzania, Alfonso E Lenhardt, and US ambassadors from six other countries, recently visited sites of IntraHealth International’s Provider-Initiated Testing and Counseling project. 

Wanda Jaskiewicz, of the IntraHealth International-led CapacityPlus global project, participated in a May 4–6 meeting in El Salvador, “Human Resources for Health Plans and Primary Health Care: The Challenges of Inter-Sectoral and Social Coordination.” The gathering was organized by the Pan American Health Organization and the Global Health Workforce Alliance in collaboration with the ministries of health of El Salvador and Brazil.

The Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project—a Capacity Project Associate Award—is supporting parasocial workers, a new cadre of community social worker serving the country’s most vulnerable children. To bolster this support, the IntraHealth International-led CapacityPlus global project is examining ways to use mobile phone technology as a tool for supportive supervision.