Our employment service supported Harvard Medical School's and Harvard School of Dental Medicine's contributions to a transformative health care workforce development program in Rwanda.

Teaching the Teachers

HSDM and HMS were two of the 23 academic institutions selected by the Government of Rwanda to collaborate on their Human Resources for Health (HRH) Program—an eight-year initiative designed to build a comprehensive, high-quality, and sustainable health care system by strengthening the health workforce education system and promoting the education and career development of the health workforce. Areas of focus included medicine, nursing, midwifery, public health, and dentistry.

With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HSDM and the University of Maryland School of Dentistry worked with the National University of Rwanda to develop a dental surgery degree program and launch the country's first-ever school of dentistry. HSDM clinical faculty deployed to Rwanda guided the curriculum development, teaching current students, and eventually transitioned the health workforce education to Rwandan faculty and personnel.

Similarly, HMS received funding from the U.S. government and the Rwandan Ministry of Health to support curriculum development for medical degree programs and to advise on such specialties as pathology, oncology, psychiatry, ENT, anesthesia, surgery, pediatrics, and internal medicine. HMS faculty taught clinicals at hospitals in Kigali and the surrounding provinces and also taught courses like quantitative research methods and biostatistics in university classrooms, where they mentored junior faculty to teach those courses in the future.

Harvard Global Services in Rwanda

HSDM and HMS utilized our employment service to support the project's in-country instructors and professors. This project was financed through the U.S. government and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, and we were able to provide employment via a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Rwandan government.