Improving Healthcare in Africa: The Non-Profit Approach

Since 2005, nurse Donna Canali has completed six assignments with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). During her first mission, she worked for six months as a nurse in Pabbo, the largest camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Uganda, where some 60,000 people had fled to escape the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government. In Pabbo camp, MSF set up a program where Ms. Canali supported the local health center, trained national nursing staff, responded to a cholera outbreak and helped to launch a Sexual and Gender Based violence program. She also assisted in a “night commuter” shelter in Gulu, where up to 5,000 children would arrive nightly for a safe place to sleep.

In 2006 she traveled to Jigawa, Nigeria, where she helped organize a meningitis vaccination campaign, and the following year in Lubango, Angola, she was head nurse for a 200-bed cholera treatment center. In 2008 she served as field coordinator for a project in El Doret, Kenya, providing mobile clinics and other support to IDPs and local communities affected by the post-election violence. In May of this year, Ms. Canali returned from a four-month assignment that took her to northeastern Kenya, 50 miles from the Somalia border. As field coordinator, she was responsible for opening a new MSF project within the Dadaab Refugee Camp Complex that provided both health and nutritional services to the newer arrivals. She has just returned from a month in the Philippines as a a member of an emergency response team following devastating typhoons there.

A Portland, Oregon, native, Stephanie Van Dyke never had intentions of going to medical school, let alone pursuing any academics after college. But after graduating with a degree in psychology and realizing this was not her calling, she left to travel the world and try to find herself through various volunteer projects. Upon returning to the United States, she realized she could not turn her back on the largest and most disparate health inadequacies she had ever seen. And so, for the first time, she pondered medicine, and realized that an MD was one of the most powerful tools she could possess to return to these third world villages to work together with locals to raise the standard of living. After recently graduating from medical school in New York, Stephanie is now a family practice resident physician at  OHSU's rural residency program in Klamath Falls. Not willing to wait until graduation to pursue her dreams, during medical school, Stephanie and several classmates built a rural healthcare clinic in Uganda. The Engeye health clinic was founded as a non-profit organization and hires locals to run the clinic during her absence. Since its inception, a laboratory and staff quarters were constructed, an incinerator installed and annual medical teams from US hospitals were established, as well as a Union College volunteer program. A team of Ugandan medical professionals continue to run the clinic in Uganda, collaborating with Stephanie and other board members on a daily basis.