Strengthening mental healthcare in Rwanda through diaspora knowledge transfer
Rwanda is recognised as a leader in the region in health innovation, particularly in primary care and community-based mental health services. Efforts to decentralise mental health services have expanded psychiatric care to district hospitals, a main goal of Rwanda’s National Mental Health Policy and the sector’s strategic plans.
As Rwanda continues to strengthen its mental health system, gaps in specialised training remain a key area for development. These include enhancing workforce capacity and ensuring that training is well-adapted to local realities and cultural contexts. Health professionals have expressed a growing interest in further developing their skills to better serve diverse communities.
Recent mapping data shows that 20% of Rwandan diaspora professionals based in Europe work in health-related fields and are willing to contribute to skills transfer initiatives, creating a strategic opportunity to align national policy with the mobilisation of diaspora expertise in health.
This project aimed to leverage the expertise of Rwandan diaspora health professionals to upskill mental health workers in Rwanda through the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC), the central implementing agency for healthcare. It did so by designing and producing training modules in cooperation with experts from the diaspora, the Luxembourg Media and Digital Design Centre, the RBC and EUDiF. The RBC, supported by local, diaspora and international experts, will use these modules to train learning facilitators and mental health professionals, thus reinforcing the role of RBC as a national training provider in mental health.
In partnership with
Programme of activities
A needs assessment conducted with RBC helped refine the capacity development needs, identifying the topics of paediatric psychiatry and epilepsy as priority training topics and developing a participant selection methodology for RBC to apply when it launches its pilot training cycle.
Informed by the needs assessment, theoretical materials were developed on paediatric psychiatry and epilepsy by tandem teams of diaspora and local healthcare experts. The raw materials on paediatric psychiatry then underwent a process of pedagogical review in order to develop an interactive learning course for piloting. The resulting course combines theoretical inputs, case-based exercises, pre- and post-testing, experience-sharing and facilitated discussion adapted to the Rwandan clinical and institutional context.
Additionally, a facilitator-training package was developed to prepare senior health professionals to accompany learners and facilitate the blended-learning approach. The package includes best practice and interactive exercises to onboard facilitators and familiarise them with Moodle and the vocational learning materials.