Africa’s health education landscape is entering a historic new chapter after the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO) officially launched the continent’s first prototype competency based curricula for ten priority health professions.
The initiative marks the culmination of an intensive, multi-year effort to reshape how Africa trains, assesses and supports its health workers. Speaking shortly after the launch, Dr Champion Nyoni, Technical Officer for Health Workforce Education and Training at WHO AFRO, unpacked the journey that brought the project from concept to reality.
A response to fragmentation and misalignment
Dr Nyoni says the drive to create a regional competency based model began with a simple but urgent question: Are we training health professionals who can truly meet the needs of African communities?
For years, education systems across the continent have faced fragmentation, outdated curricula and a disconnect between what students learn in classrooms and what frontline practice demands.
“We were worried about the fragmentation of education, the disconnect between what students are taught and what they get to do in practice,” Dr Nyoni explained. The solution was to rethink and modernise the entire training pipeline.
Anchored in global standards, adapted for Africa
To guide the transformation, WHO drew from its global frameworks, including the Global Competency and Outcomes Framework for Universal Health Coverage.
At regional level, this framework was “operationalised” to ensure the outcomes reflect Africa’s realities, disease burdens, available resources and local health systems.
Over one and a half years, WHO AFRO mapped priority outcomes for each profession, asking what graduates must be able to do on the day they enter the workforce. This guided the structure and direction of the new curricula.
A continent-wide collaborative process
A key turning point was the establishment of the Curriculum Development Advisory Group—a panel of 16 senior experts drawn from across Africa, representing over 300 cumulative years of experience in health education, regulation and professional practice.
Their role was to provide strategic oversight and ensure the curricula reflected both scientific rigour and lived realities of African health systems.
Drafts were circulated widely: technical units within WHO, more than 300 stakeholders, member states, academic institutions and even students contributed to refining the framework. Each round of feedback strengthened the final product.
Shifting from exams to real-world competence
One of the most significant transformations in the new model is how competence is assessed.
“Previously competence meant writing an exam and passing a three-hour paper,” Dr Nyoni said. “Now the focus shifts to what you are actually able to do.”
Instead of theoretical recall, students will be evaluated on supervised clinical tasks, practical performance and ongoing feedback. Competence becomes a lived, demonstrated ability—not a test score.
Supporting countries to adopt and adapt
With the regional launch complete, WHO AFRO now turns to the next phase: helping countries turn the prototype curricula into national programmes.
“We need to cascade these documents from being regional documents to country-level documents,” Dr Nyoni noted. WHO will work closely with regulatory bodies and higher education institutions to adapt the model to each country’s context.
Parallel to this, WHO is developing African Health Professions Education Quality Standards, which will allow institutions to benchmark performance, harmonise training, and enable smoother movement of health workers across borders.
Towards a harmonised African health workforce
The long-term vision is clear: an Africa where countries share aligned training standards, where qualifications are mutually recognised, and where health workers can practise across borders without repetitive exams or re-training.
“Malaria in Congo and malaria in South Africa is still malaria,” Dr Nyoni said. “But countries need space to adapt the curricula to their treatment guidelines and realities.”
The prototype curricula provide a shared foundation, while giving countries the freedom to tailor training to national needs.
A historic turning point
The launch of Africa’s first regionally designed competency based health curricula represents one of the most ambitious education reforms in decades. It signals a shift towards modern, skills-based, people-centred training—one that aligns with Universal Health Coverage goals and strengthens Africa’s health workforce for generations to come.
As countries prepare to adopt and implement the new model, WHO AFRO will continue providing support, oversight and technical guidance to ensure that the continent’s next generation of health professionals is better equipped than ever before.