BY THERESIA TJIHENUNA, 22 NOVEMBER 2013
NAMIBIA and Ethiopia on Wednesday signed an agreement for health training programmes for Namibian health professionals, including doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists and paramedics.
The agreement was signed by the Ethiopian Health Minister Kesetebirhan Admasu and his Namibian counterpart Richard Kamwi in Windhoek.
As part of the MoU, the parties agreed that the Ethiopian government will provide Namibia with health professionals, experts and health-related tutors as well as to continue providing scholarships for an agreed number of Namibian students to Ethiopia.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Kamwi said the two countries have similar health challenges of maternal deaths and communicable and non-communicable diseases, and it is only imperative that they learn from each other.
"We face the same challenges in the areas of communicable diseases such as HIV-AIDS, TB, diarrhoea, and childkiller diseases. This is in addition to the emerging non-communicable lifestyle diseases such as prostate, breast and cervical cancer, maternal mortality and malnutrition," he said. He also said the shortage of health workers of all categories in the countries was critical and that it was difficult to attract and retain health professionals in rural areas.
Kamwi said government has been gradually shifting resources to the disadvantaged regions, focusing on promotive, preventive and basic curative services provided by health centres, clinics, outreach services and community-based health care. "We currently have both public and private health sectors providing health services in the country, however, the collaboration between the two sectors needs to be strengthened," he said.
The Ethiopian government, he said, under its ministry of health, assisted Namibia with piloting the Health Extension Workers' Programme in the Kunene Region where 40 workers were trained.
The role of the extension workers is to promote disease prevention in communities, promote hygiene, sanitation and immunisation and perform maternal and child health assessments. Admasu said his country was winning the war against the health challenges it faced and that it was prepared to transfer the same health strategies to Namibia.
According to Kamwi, health extension programmes were rolled out in five regions with the assistance of the Ethiopian government, namely the Zambezi, Kavango, Ohangwena, Omusati and Kunene.
"A total of 565 Health Extension Workers are currently undergoing training in those regions this year," he said.
He said the Kunene pilot project was sponsored by Unicef and the EU, with the training of six months offered by the government of Ethiopia.
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