Last week, I attended a 3 day workshop in Mwanza on strengthening the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services in Tanzania. Attending the workshop really made clear to me the classic and all too common challenges of doing development work.
There are many NGOs in Tanzania doing PMTCT work. With so many cooks in the kitchen, communication between organizations about who is doing what and where is poor. Many times these NGOs are fighting for the same international funding or grants, so any new kid on the block (like our organization) will often be seen as a competitor.
Being at the workshop also highlighted to me personally how many trained Tanzanian medical doctors choose to forgo clinical work for public health/policy work where the pay is higher. Brain drain is a real problem here, as I discovered in some conversations with Tanzanian health care professionals. For those who have the option to move to Europe or North America to further their training, the incentives to stay overseas to practice medicine are enormous, thus reducing the already small number of health care workers in the country.
And so we face the same big questions that plague so many others in this line of work: How can we work well with other NGOs and partners to reduce the number of children that become infected from their mothers? How can we make sure there are enough drugs available for pregnant women? And how can the government keep trained medical doctors in Tanzania to perform the all important clinical work of providing these drugs to pregnant women?
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