Reimagining a Future-Ready, Resilient, and Equitable Health Workforce for Africa

Africa faces one of the world's most significant health workforce challenges. Countries across the continent currently meet only a fraction of their maternal, newborn, and child health workforce needs, with critical shortages of midwives, doctors, and Community Health Workers (CHWs) undermining progress toward universal health coverage and preventing millions of women and children from accessing lifesaving care. At the same time, demographic growth, constrained fiscal space, health worker migration, uneven distribution, and gaps in workforce quality and retention continue to outpace efforts to strengthen health systems.

Yet there is a powerful opportunity: investments in health workforce strengthening are among the highest-return investments available to improve health outcomes, economic productivity, and system resilience. Evidence shows that scaling up midwifery and CHW, strengthening training institutions, improving workforce management, and enabling sustainable domestic financing can dramatically accelerate reductions in maternal, newborn, and child mortality.

This session will bring together government leaders, frontline health workforce representatives, development partners, philanthropies, and financing institutions to explore how Africa can build a future-ready, resilient, and equitable health workforce. The discussion will focus on practical solutions that move beyond workforce expansion alone to address quality, deployment, retention, digital transformation, workforce data systems, and sustainable financing.

Participants will examine how country-led reforms, innovative financing models, stronger workforce information systems, and strategic investments in midwives and CHWs can create lasting change, ensuring that every woman, newborn, and child has access to the skilled care they need, when and where they need it most.