Collaborating with Africa

In the late 1980s, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Kenya’s Moi University began a small partnership exchanging medical faculty, focused on the challenges of establishing a Moi University (Moi) medical school. “We had four Indiana University faculty with experience working in developing countries who were dedicated to establishing a linkage with a health sciences center in the developing world at a time when there were almost no avenues for individual academics to engage globally,” says Robert Einterz, one of the four Indiana University faculty members. “We were looking for opportunities in research, care, and training. Moi was starting its second medical school in Eldoret and they had four faculty members looking for linkages, too. They wanted help establishing their school of medicine, more teachers, and faculty collaboration opportunities. We found each other.”

The HIV/AIDS crisis helped transform the relationship. As the epidemic swept across western Kenya in the early 1990s, the collaboration dramatically scaled up and an expanded version of the partnership, the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH), was born. The priority in AMPATH’s early years was in “putting out the fire” of HIV/AIDS with every AMPATH clinic operating as a frontline resource, a classroom, and a laboratory, notes AMPATH: A Strategic Partnership in Kenya, a description of the program authored by Ian McIntosh, director of international partnerships at IUPUI, and Eunice Kamaara, a professor of religious studies at Moi.

The AMPATH collaboration has grown into a sprawling North-South, U.S.-Kenya medical partnership that provides opportunities for