Newswise — For nearly a decade, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been developing an expanding presence in Afghanistan, providing technical and educational programs that train teachers, improve that country’s higher education system, and now help develop training for doctors and other medical personnel.
The most recent manifestation of this UMass Amherst connection to Afghanistan began in July 2009 when the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) asked the Center for International Education (CIE) and the Institute for Global Health (IGH) to work with Kabul Medical University. The two main tasks for the UMass team are to help improve the quality of medical education and develop a school of public health that will offer a master’s degree program.
The two UMass agencies are working within a consortium called the Higher Education Project – Medical Education (HEP-ME) that includes the Academy for Educational Development as the prime contractor, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Indiana University and the Academy for Educational Development. Overall it’s a $5.4 million project with UMass’ share being $1.1 million.
David R. Evans, professor in the UMass Amherst School of Education and CIE director, says his agency will be working to improve teaching methods and faculty training and building institutional capacity at the medical school.
He says one of the challenges is built right into the current higher education system in Afghanistan. Students finishing the equivalent of high school take placement exams similar to our SATs, and those with the highest scores traditionally attend the medical university. These students, however well qualified, enter an antiquated medical education system that has suffered through 30 years of war, the Soviet occupation and later control of the Taliban who restricted education of women.
David R. Buchanan, head of IGH and professor of public health in the UMass School of Public Health and Health Sciences, says a critical goal for his agency is to revise the admissions system to attract more students focused on learning to be medical doctors, and to seek more applicants from the outlying provinces. The plan also seeks to get more women into medical training, an important move in a traditional Muslim country where the very idea of educating women can be contentious.
The IGH will also be working to revise existing education and training to put a stronger emphasis on primary care, something that is a pressing need in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in that part of the world.
“Overall, we’re concerned about improving the relevance and adequacy of medical training at the university,” Buchanan says.
Evans says his agency has an eight-year history of working in Afghanistan and this latest project is the largest. He is working with fellow education professor Joseph Berger. Evans says the new medical education program shows how efforts by UMass over a period of years have expanded in Afghanistan. “It’s a beautiful example of starting small and building on each example,” he says.
In 2006, CIE was awarded a five-year, $7.6 million grant from USAID to develop faculties of education in 16 universities in Afghanistan that train secondary teachers. That program recently saw its first group of master’s candidates graduate from the UMass Amherst School of Education. The seven graduates have since returned to Afghanistan.
There are also three doctoral candidates from Afghanistan at the School of Education, including Habibullah Wajdi, who was an advisor to the seven visiting scholars. He says Afghanistan has a pressing need for highly trained faculty members to work in that country’s higher education system.
He says the UMass Amherst program is playing a key role in training those educators. He says the seven Afghans who just earned their master’s degrees won’t be just teaching at their home universities, “They will be mobilizing the students and faculty at those schools.”
In this sense, Wajdi says, “UMass has done a very good job for the Afghan educational system.”
In 2005, UMass played a key role in a program also funded by USAID that was designed to provide health education and literacy training to women who wanted to become community health workers. That program has since ended, Evans says.
The CIE’s involvement in Afghanistan dates to the fall of the Taliban in 2002 when the center secured three small contracts to work in that county. Since that time, the programs have grown, Evans says, but so has the network of connections within the country and back to the Amherst campus. That process was moved along in the early years because UMass Amherst alumnus, Patrick Fine, was head of USAID and was working with other alumni in the country.
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