Africa has nearly a million unemployed health workers despite workforce crisis

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Nearly one million healthcare workers in Africa are unemployed even as the continent faces a shortage of almost six million staff, according to experts at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The WHO's Africa workforce lead said expanding training has not translated into employment because governments lack sufficient funding and workforce plans.

Almost one million African healthcare workers, including doctors, are unemployed despite the continent needing six million more staff to meet health needs, experts told an event at the World Health Summit in Berlin.1James Avoka Asamani, who leads the workforce team at the World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa, said that the continent faced a “paradoxical” workforce crisis. He said that while Africa’s training capacity had expanded rapidly, governments did not have the money or workforce plan to employ and deploy staff where they were needed.Asamani said the continent needed at least 5.85 million more health workers to cope with its disease burden and that this figure could rise in future. He said that although African countries now train more than 325 000 healthcare workers a year—more than double the number of healthcare workers trained in the continent 10 years ago—this had not translated into better staffing.“But this has resulted...