Pape Gaye, president & CEO of IntraHealth International, in his current visit to India for the global maternal health conference, speaks to FE?s Soma Das about shortage of healthcare workforce in the country and if recession has affected corporate funding for philanthropic activities. The US-based not-for-profit organisation is working in the area of health workforce, family planning and reproductive health with presence in 30 countries including India. Excerpts

How serious is the problem of scarcity of health workers in India? And if you could also comment on the quality of health workers here?

While a lot of work around public health is going on in India and the key indicators such as maternal mortality rate are capturing the progress, but acute shortage of human resource for health in India leaves me astonished. A country which produces and exports doctors, paramedics and health workers to the whole world, a trend I can vouch for through my own experience, is so deficient in healthcare personnel. When the World Health Report, mapped the ratio of healthcare personnel per 1,000 population in the 57 crisis-ridden countries, India ranked 53 but when you just focus on the data for shortage of healthcare workforce, India stood at rank 1 recording maximum shortage.

Has economic recession hit corporate funding for philanthropic activities severely?

The corporate funding for major philanthropic activities occur in cycles, usually a rolling average of three to five years because of which the full impact of economic recession on philanthropic funding cannot be measured directly and immediately. But unlike stock markets, grants and endowments would get affected with a time lag. Till now the momentum is on but now it is reaching a clear plateau. And there is a paradigm shift in the way programmes are being conceived and planned. There is immense focus on ?country ownership? of projects, even for the ongoing ones. There is a realisation that donors cannot fund a programme in perpetuity. And stakeholders in the countries (government and civil society) where the project is being undertaken has to gradually adopt, fund and run the programmes, once it is successfully in place. Donors are also partially part of the problem. Sometimes their demands on reporting are too rigid and is not synchronised with ground realities.

IntraHealth has been mainly funded by USAID and Gates Foundation. Have you explored the idea of funding from local corporates?

Although it is still at a nascent stage, we are weighing pros and cons of tying with local corporates for funding programmes. This is still at a conceptional stage and has to be approved by our organisation at a global policy level. But India remains a focus country for us and we are considering the option to expand footprint here geographically as well as looking at the possibility of involvement in other programmes. But we still have to decide on these matters and firm up our plans.

The health ministry in India is finalising a plan on bachelor of rural healthcare, who will serve in designated rural areas but wouldn?t be full fledged doctors. Your comments.

I think it?s a good idea to explore and customise healthcare plans. National Rural Health Mission is a good example. A large part of our problem is that we are still carrying the legacy of our colonisers and the way they approached healthcare, which was not necessarily the utopian method. Creating access to healthcare in unserved and underserved areas through innovative solutions like rural doctors albeit through well implemented plans sounds innovative to me.