Mar 17, 2005
Corporate America Partnering with Africa: Strengthening Local Capacity and Improving Health Care on the Continent
This seminar offered a vivid example of the constructive role that U.S. corporations can play in addressing the numerous health challenges confronting Africa. Participants included Representative Barbara Lee; Patricia Christen, President, Infectious Diseases Institute, Ltd. and President, HopeLab; Robert Mallett, Senior Vice President, Pfizer Inc. and Professor Nelson Sewankambo, Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Makerere University.
In this seminar, the speakers explored some of the dimensions of what it means to have the “absorptive capacity” to effectively utilize support for health care, and how that capacity can be strengthened, leveraged and deployed in the African context. The partners that worked together to build the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala (Pfizer, the Pangea Foundation and Makerere Univeristy) reflected on their contributions to improvements in health care capacity and research, but also to improvements in architecture, construction and project management in Uganda.