Mission

Born in 2006, Madaktari Africa, a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization, began its mission to improve health care through the training and education of local medical personnel. Our mission is to improve a country's medical autonomy by improving the availability and quality of local health care.

For Madaktari participants, the primary goal is to help both patients and local health care staff. To achieve our goal, we use a "Train-Forward" model, which requires that our students become effective teachers. In practical terms this means that we train local medical staff in both medical interventions and how to effectively teach their newly acquired skills to others. As more doctors and nurses are trained, gaining more independence and becoming teachers themselves, a system of knowledge transfer begins to grow exponentially, creating a sustainable cycle of medical personnel growth that we believe can be a determining factor in ending a country's dependency on foreign assistance.

Madaktari began this "Train Forward" model by training an assistant medical officer in Haydom, Tanzania to become a neurosurgeon. Since then, additional programs in various medical specialties have been developed in other parts of the country. Madaktari continues to grow its efforts and expand its reach, while striving to accomplish its mission of improved health care and medical autonomy.

What We Do

Recognizing the increasing burden of CVD within Tanzania, and the potential to leverage the Train-Forward model to address these challenges, Madaktari Africa set its sights on CVD. Dr. Ellegala began to contact internal medicine and cardiology colleagues to see if they were interested in volunteering with Madaktari. Specifically, he asked if they would help train Tanzanian clinicians and village officers in the primary and secondary prevention of CVD at the clinic and hospital level. The efforts were centered primarily on skill and knowledge transfer in the diagnosis and management of common cardiovascular conditions in a rural setting. However, it became evident that such program would need to be pursued in parallel with an effort to establish a tertiary cardiovascular center of excellence. Such as center would be needed to address the increasing volume and complexity of patients with CVD and provide training to a new generation of cardiovascular health professionals.