School of Public Health Selected to host International Postgraduate Training Scheme

University of Ghana specifically, the School of Public Health, has been selected to host an international postgraduate training scheme for Masters and PhD level students, providing full scholarship to up to 10 Masters and 5PhDs students each year.  The training will be focused on implementation research, which supports the identification of health system bottlenecks and approaches to address them. Professor John Gyapong, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Development is the Lead person on this Project.

TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, has provided the award. TDR is hosted at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, where it is co-sponsored by UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank and WHO.

The University of Ghana is one of seven universities from low- and middle-income countries that have been selected to manage these grants. There are three universities in Africa, 2 in Asia, and 1 each in Latin America and the Middle East.  Each will serve students from their regions.

The new plan will provide up to US$13 million in support for over 200 PhD and Master’s degree students in the next 4 years. The grants are available to students from low- and middle-income countries. The goal is to enhance graduate training capacity and boost the number of researchers in these countries, and provide regional support through these universities and the Regional Training Centres supported by TDR.

Professor Richard Adanu, Dean of the University of Ghana School of Public Health said, “The School of Public Health is extremely delighted to be able to make such a major contribution to the training of Public Health researchers and practitioners in the region.  He described this as “a development that goes to prove that University of Ghana is a leader in postgraduate education in Africa.”

Grant applications will be released on 15th June, 2015 for the coming academic year 2015/2016. Recipients will be enrolled as postgraduate students, and their careers will be tracked with the new TDR Global alumni and stakeholder platform that will be launched in the next year, providing ongoing monitoring of the impact of the programme, as well as networking and increased visibility opportunities for students.