Award winning Uganda health program expands

Posted January 13, 2010
By Marta Cyperling

Local people are trained to address common health issuesA program developed at the Faculty of Medicine that improves the health of children in Uganda has been so successful it is expanding, winning awards, and has been featured in a prestigious medical journal.

UCalgary’s Dr. Jenn Brenner helped launch Healthy Child Uganda (HCU) in 2003. It is a community-based partnership that works with local Ugandans to identify and solve the problems that most impact the health of Ugandan children. The African country has one of the highest child death rates in the world and many children die from diseases and conditions that are easy and inexpensive to treat, such as malaria and diarrhea.

The program has recently received two new grants, funding that will help volunteer health ambassadors in Uganda.

“We are very excited to expand the project. The grants will support Ugandan and Canadian researchers in evaluating an extended role for our current village health volunteers, who currently provide child health education and basic triage for ill children”, says Brenner, one of the program’s co-directors.

Local people are trained as volunteer health ambassadors to address what to Canadians are common health issues. Malaria is the leading cause of death, and diarrhea is one of the top five child killers. Malnutrition, measles and pneumonia are other illnesses that are taking a terrible toll; 137 children in 1,000 will die before their fifth birthday. A group of volunteer health ambassadors

There is $350,000 in funding from the African Health Systems Initiative (AHSI) which is part of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) under the Global Health Research Initiative and another $83,365 from the UK Government's Department for International Development (DfID).

In addition to the new project funding, members from the Ugandan HCU team were in Calgary last November to meet with their Calgary colleagues and discuss the new initiatives of the program. Members from the Ugandan and Calgary HCU team at the Alberta Children's Hospital in November 2009

Dr. Jerome Kabakyenga, Dean of Medicine at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) was excited to be in Calgary to discuss the next phase of the project. He has seen first hand the impact the program has on the rural communities it works with.

“Healthy Child Uganda has shown that village health volunteers if well selected, trained and supported can change their communities in health and development. The HCU model is low cost and produces results,” he says.

Kabakyenga is a co-director in the HCU program and is also the recent winner of the 2008 Teasdale Corti Global Health Leadership Award.  Only 13 people involved in international health around the world received this award.

In addition to new funding and awards for project members, the success of HCU in improving child health in Uganda has also grabbed the attention of at least one high profile medical journal. The program’s promising results were featured in the November 2009 edition of  The Lancet.

Healthy Child Uganda is a partnership between Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), University of Calgary, University of Dalhousie, Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS), the local health districts of Mbarara and Bushenyi and local communities which have been supported by CIDA and other private donors.

Learn more about Healthy Child Uganda

Official website

Read about Healthy Child Uganda as featured in U Magazine's Winter 2009 edition

Read The Lancet article 

“Strengthening Maternal Child Health in Rural Uganda” profiling Dr. Jerome Kabakyenga