The Africa Children’s Nursing Observatory aims to make the work of children’s nursing educators in Africa visible. It is a collaborative initiative of the Africa Children’s Nursing Educator Forum (CNEF), led by The Harry Crossley Children’s Nursing Development Unit.
As indicated by Sustainable Development Goal Target 3C – ‘to increase…. the recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce in developing countries’ – training is a critical element of the concept of ‘workforce’. Driven by this, educators in the CNEF have been sharing information about training programmes and student throughput since 2016. In 2020, this information moved to the Open Science Framework[1] and the Africa Children’s Nursing Workforce Observatory was established.
It is the intention that data from the Observatory provides a comprehensive picture of the children’s nursing training activity in the region, and by making it freely available to national stakeholders, informs decisions about future African nursing workforce development activities and plans.
Each year, the Unit leads the process of data gathering and analysing to generate the following three resources:
- An annual Children’s Nursing Training Activity Summary Report. This provides key insights from the previous year’s student throughput (graduations) and current training programmes. For the latest Summary Report click here and for past reports click here.
- A country level Dashboard. This provides current and historical data about the programmes available in the region's countries, filterable by institution and year, and set alongside available child health indicators. Data visualisations present the trends in training activity at country and institution level, alongside graduate numbers and educator capacity.
- An African Children’s Nursing Educators Forum Directory. This presents information (contact details, programmes level and entry requirements, and 'active' status), to funders, employers and potential students, about training programmes, available in the region.
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A call to action:
Updates to the dashboard and directory are ongoing, made as awareness of countries and training institutions offering specialised paediatric / child nursing training change.
As more institutions provide data, it is hoped that the strength of the information presented in the Observatory, and subsequent reports, will improve and that it can be extended to cover numbers of children’s nurses in practice and patterns of deployment.
If you would like to add information about a children’s nursing training programme in Africa, please contact Children's Nursing Development Unit on cndu@uct.ac.za
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This project has been made possible through generous support from the VITOL Foundation.