HWIP Tackling Ethiopia’s Health Workforce Challenges using CLA Approaches

Ethiopia has made substantial progress in improving health outcomes due, in part, to better availability, accessibility, quality and acceptability of its health workforce. On April 7, 2020, USAID awarded Jhpiego a 5-year Health Workforce Improvement Program (HWIP) to make Ethiopia’s health workforce better skilled and managed and support Ethiopia’s aspirations to achieve health sustainable development goal targets. HWIP intentionally built in collaborating, learning and adapting (CLA) approaches like co-creation, human-centered design, pause and reflect, collaborative leadership platforms and CLA dashboards at the beginning of the program to monitor progress, evaluate outcomes, and adapt approaches where necessary to maximize impact.

As a result of these interventions, multi-stakeholder partnerships and more effective collaborations with local stakeholders are leading to impactful change. Specifically, partnering local Health Education Institutions (HEI) have updated institutional organograms to include Health Science Education Development Centers and Gender offices. These HEIs conducted 52 academic program self-evaluations, faculty development initiatives for 1,191 instructors, and gender training courses for 180 teaching staff further improving institutional and individual faculty capacity. In addition, HWIP developed an online faculty development course on competency-based curriculum and about 30 needs-based digital continuous professional development courses were developed to reach more than 6,200 health professionals in priority health topics. These are just a few examples of how integrating and applying CLA approaches continues to enhance the Project’s ability to reach its goal of ensuring Ethiopia’s health workforce is better skilled, managed and motivated to achieve universal health coverage and health targets of the sustainable development goals (SDG).