About 15% of the world’s population have some form of disability, and there is a growing number of people experiencing functioning difficulties. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one in five people or 210 million people need  ehabilitation due to the double burden of infectious and non-communicable chronic health conditions. Despite this unmet need, availability of rehabilitation services in Africa is extremely limited due to the inadequate number of competently trained rehabilitation professionals. This AfroRehab partnership aims at strengthening the rehabilitation workforce in East Africa by developing an innovative educational digital ecosystem with interdisciplinary master programs in rehabilitation.

These master programs will secure sustainable training of qualified physiotherapists, occupational therapists, prosthetists and orthotists, speech and language therapists, audiologists and optometrists in Tanzania (TZ), Kenya (KE) and beyond. It will promote rehabilitation services and research across sectors, responding to World Health Organizations (WHO) Rehabilitation 2030 Call for Action and Rehabilitation Strategies in both countries. Four African Universities, two in Tanzania and two in Kenya, and two European Universities from Norway and Finland will collaborate in developing and implementing Master of Science (MSc) in Rehabilitation programs, one in each African country. The blended, interprofessional rehabilitation programs aim to respond to the specific country’s needs while allowing the participating universities to strengthen their academic capacity.

By contributing their expertise, the partners will co-create and co-implement two context-sensitive MSc in Rehabilitation that will offer profession-specific exits, student active learning, placements across public and private sectors, and participatory research. These programs will create advanced career paths for rehabilitation professionals capable of developing and leading new undergraduate programs. The future MSc graduates, originally
recruited from public healthcare facilities and higher education institutions (HEIs) across both countries, will ensure the creation and implementation of new professional BSc programs contributing to a more even rural-urban supply and distribution of rehabilitation professionals reaching the most vulnerable groups.

The programs will be the first two interdisciplinary MSc in Rehabilitation programs in East Africa that combine online and on campus delivery of courses using a blended learning approach. They will also serve as bases for establishing educational, service and research hubs and networks across the region. A spin-off will be the production of digital continuing professional development courses and micro-credentials in rehabilitation, digital rehabilitation promotion material and tele-rehabilitation networks. For the European partners, where higher education (HE) is still strongly biased towards western contexts with little competence in global and minority health, it will result in capacity building through co-produced material, international staff and student exchanges, co-supervision,
and collaborative research, thus extending the impact beyond the partner countries.