Welcome to the website for the University of Edinburgh’s collaborative projects with medical and healthcare institutions in Malawi.
The lead for the University of Edinburgh is located in the Learning Technology Section in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.
The three Projects build on Edinburgh’s strengths in medical education and e-learning and our aim is to support our partner institutions in Malawi to transform medical, nursing and clinical officer training in Malawi through the introduction of e-learning.
Our partners are:
- The College of Medicine (CoM), University of Malawi, Blantyre (UG and PG medical education and training)
- Kamuzu College of Nursing (KCN), University of Malawi, Lilongwe and Blantyre (UG and PG nursing education and training)
- Malawi College of Health Sciences (MCHS), Lilongwe and Zomba (Clinical Officer and Nursing (diploma) education and training)
Malawi needs to address a critical shortage of health care workers (doctors, clinical officers, nurses). The Ministry of Health have requested the major Health training institutions to rapidly increase student numbers and recognized that a number of barriers need to be overcome to enable this expansion to take place. For example, there are inadequate resources (accessible at the point of need and independent of a formal educational/training setting), there is a shortage of teaching staff, and there is a lack of appreciation of and knowledge about innovative teaching methods and use of ICT.
The Edinburgh-led Projects are all funded by the Scottish Government International Development Fund and are designed to help our partner institutions to overcome these barriers. Thus they have supported the Malawian healthcare education institutions to transform their curricula, empower students to take responsibility for their own learning, ensure free access to a wide-range of digital resources, improve the IT infrastructure and technical skills of IT-support staff, build capacity by training teaching staff to create resources locally, and provide professional staff development in innovative pedagogies.
