Global Health Academy Summer School 2015

The Global Health Academy’s (GHA) Summer School is an annual programme organised for online distance learning students.

The event, hosted this year in Kigali, Rwanda, brought together masters students, local practitioners and academic specialists engaged with the University’s Global Health Academy. The aim of the programme is to offer students an opportunity to join a network of local peers and interact in person with the GHA’s leading specialists in their field.

Kigali was a lovely place to learn with some of the best colleagues from all over the world. I ended up being nourished in many ways from the whole experience.

One Health

The 2015 programme was built around the theme of ‘One Health’ - an effort to improve health and wellbeing by preventing crises that impact animals, humans and the environment.

University academics joined forces with researchers and clinicians from the Universities of Rwanda and Makerere in Uganda to offer a week-long programme of lectures and workshops to support students through their postgraduate learning.

Topics included service innovations such as the development of eHealth technology across Rwanda, as well as practical teaching sessions on statistical research, policy briefing and dissertation composition.

Students were also invited to engage with local health practitioners and campaigners engaged with front-line healthcare efforts.

Student Experience

28 students from a range of countries who study on the GHA’s distance learning programmes joined the school, spanning a range of programmes, including:-

• Biodiversity wildlife and Ecosystems Health
• Global health and infectious diseases
• International animal health
• Global Health - Non-communicable diseases
• One Health

The GHA Summer school was one my best experiences of all the GHA activities. Being an online distance learner, it was great to come together face-to-face with the faculty who run the programmes. Interacting with students from different parts of the world pursuing different courses within the GHA was enlightening and I felt that we had so much in common despite our different disciplines and backgrounds. This is a great way of promoting the one-health approach that stresses the fact that the responsibility of promoting population health lies with every sector and every discipline.

Annual Event

The Global Health Academy runs the week-long Summer School programme every year.

It is open to masters students on a full range of global health on-line distance learning programmes

Details of the 2016 GHA Summer School programme will be announced on the Global Health website in early 2016.

Our summer school ran just before the UN launched the new Sustainable Development Goals, and it embodies precisely the approach that they call for: interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, and inter-professional sharing of knowledge. This approach opens up a compound of ideas that could seed future solutions to the great global challenges we face today