Dear Partners and Friends,

Happy New Year 2013!

As we embark on this year, I give gratitude to our devoted partners both local and international, who supported us and believed in our work. It is due to the concerted efforts that BMAF continues to thrive with each passing year and has registered significant progress in its programs related to health systems strengthening, and enhancing service delivery including HIV/AIDS and Maternal Health. Some of the key successful highlights for 2012 include;

• Recruitment of 464 health professionals including doctors, nurses, laboratory technologists and tutors that were deployed to districts, regional hospitals and health training institutions to reinforce HIV/AIDS and other health services.
• Training, coaching and mentoring of more than 2,060 health managers on Human Resource Management and Professional ethics and scaling up of the best practices within the districts through knowledge sharing forums.
• Construction of 90 staff house at rural health facilities in the regions of Mtwara, Rukwa and Katavi, whereby initial 30 houses have been handed over in Mtwara in December 2012- all aiming to enhance staff retention.
• 5 Job Fairs (Career expo) were conducted in 5 Regions within the country to inform final year pre-service students, graduates and the general public on potentials of joining the public health service in rural areas. This stimulated more than 1000 health students to submit employment request in rural underserved districts of Tanzania.
• Sharing of health workforce policy briefs and recommendations to key policy makers resulted into stronger commitment and actions on Human Resource for Health interventions across the Government ministries.

The above interventions contributed to worthy results such as, Improved retention of newly recruited health workers and reduction of vacancy rates by more than 5% in the beneficiary underserved districts.

We further led BMAF’s first local fundraising occasion which was able to net a total of TZS 3.2 Billion to support implementation of the first wave of Mkapa Fellows Phase 2 program, that aims to enhance the HIV/AIDS and Maternal Health services. We thank you all the Corporates, Donors and well- wishers that donated to this noble course.

For 2013, the Mkapa Foundation will continue:

• Defining its comprehensive institutional business plan and development strategy of the next five years, aiming to become more sustainable and executing programs that serve the needs of rural Tanzanians.
• Expanding our initiatives country wide on improving health workforce situation and Reinforcement of health service delivery on Prevention of Mother to Child HIV/AIDS transmission, HIV Care and Treatment and Emergency Obstetric Care.

Once again I wish you a prosperous New Year and looking forward to a continued mutual and trusted partnership. Together we can bring HOPE to rural Tanzanians! 

Dr. Ellen Mkondya -Senkoro
-January 2013