Although Uganda has made progress in scaling up malaria control interventions, currently it falls far short of indicator targets that have been set. To meet the current and future challenges posed by the need for malaria control, Ugandan expertise must grow and diversify. There are currently few skilled malaria experts and managers in Uganda. In 1998, a collaborative malaria research project was established between Makerere University and the University of California, San Francisco (MU-UCSF). This academic collaboration formed the basis for the creation in 2001 of the Uganda Malaria Surveillance Project (UMSP), a multi-site surveillance system and research platform whose key partners include MU-UCSF, the Uganda Ministry of Health, Makerere University School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. To date, MU-UCSF and UMSP have been highly productive and successful providing high- quality data which has helped to guide malaria treatment policy in Uganda, and training a number of junior scientists. Makerere University Faculty of Medicine, with support from MU-UCSF and UMSP, now proposes to develop and implement a training program designed to build capacity for clinical, operational and health services research and program management in Uganda to ensure effective nationwide scale-up of the available malaria control tools. We propose to provide training in evaluating the cost and effectiveness of malaria control strategies, and establishing improved systems to monitor and evaluate the impact of these interventions. Training in this program will be linked to on-going research and educational projects of the participating institutions in Uganda, the US, the UK and Kenya. The training experiences will range from short courses of weeks to months duration, to degree and non-degree programs of one to two years duration. We propose to provide training to public health program managers, physicians, nurses, entomologists, social scientists and health information managers involved in malaria control. We anticipate training 12 candidates in master's degree programs and approximately 90 candidates in non-degree programs.
Uganda now has an unprecedented opportunity to improve malaria control with support from the President's Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, significant challenges remain, including how to best deliver proven interventions to large numbers of vulnerable people, and how to manage national-scale malaria control programs. Improved in-country expertise in operational and health services research will assist the Ministry of Health in establishing policies for the control of malaria.
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