By Tendai Chisiri
Harare – Merck Foundation Chief Executive Officer, Senator Dr. Rasha Kelej has said Africa cannot build sustainable cancer care systems by donating equipment and medicines alone, but by building specialised human capacity.
Dr. Kelej makes the remarks in her new leadership article titled “We Did Not Donate Cancer Care. We Built the People Who Could Deliver It” published under her virtual Mentorship and Leadership Platform, “Beyond Power; Leadership, Global Influence and Impact”.
“You cannot build a sustainable healthcare system without building its people first,” she writes. “Hospitals are important. Equipment is important. Medicines are essential. But who will diagnose the patient? Who will determine the treatment? Who will operate the equipment?”
According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Africa recorded approximately 1.19 million new cancer cases and 764,000 cancer deaths in 2022, with many patients facing late diagnosis, limited screening, shortages of specialists and geographical inequalities in access to treatment.
Dr. Kelej said in many African countries where Merck Foundation started its programmes, there were no locally trained oncologists at all or multidisciplinary cancer-care teams were not adequately developed.
To address the gap, the Foundation has provided more than 280 one-year, two-year and three-year scholarships in multidisciplinary cancer care for healthcare providers from 35 African countries.
The programme has supported the training of the first local oncologists in countries including Liberia, The Gambia, Burundi, Niger and the Central African Republic, while strengthening oncology capacity in countries such as Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone.
“For me, this is what capacity building really means. It is not about arriving with a temporary solution. It is about helping a country develop the expertise to care for its own people,” Dr. Kelej said.
She said the Foundation’s approach focuses on long-term postgraduate and clinical specialty education through academic and clinical institutions in countries including India, Egypt and the United Kingdom, rather than short workshops.
“We are not simply increasing awareness of oncology. We are helping create oncologists. And once that specialist returns home, the impact does not end with one scholarship. That doctor can diagnose and treat patients for years,” she added.
Dr. Kelej also highlighted the need to address geographical inequality, noting that specialists are often concentrated in capital cities. She said the strategy has increasingly focused on supporting healthcare providers from different regions and institutions so that knowledge extends beyond capitals to secondary cities, regional hospitals and underserved populations.
She emphasized partnerships with local academic institutions, medical societies, governments, Ministries of Health and Education, First Ladies and Presidents as key to developing sustainable national healthcare capacity.
“Infrastructure may age. Technology may become obsolete. A supply of medicine will eventually be consumed or expired. But knowledge can multiply,” she said, adding that the ultimate success of capacity building is when countries become less dependent on outside expertise because the expertise now exists at home.
The full article is available on Dr. Kelej’s Substack Mentorship Platform and on the Merck Foundation website.
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