Partners

Kinshasa School of Public Health, DR Congo              

The Kinshasa School of Public Health (KSPH) was established in 1984 with funding from USAID and support from Tulane University. The primary mission of the KSPH is to contribute to the improvement of health and well-being of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo through research, education and public health interventions. It is a testament to the determination, commitment and resourcefulness of the KSPH that it continued to carry out its mission during the fall of the Mobutu regime and the ensuing civil conflicts.

Our Fogarty project is establishing a bioethics center within the KSPH. The mission of the new center is to serve the health care sector and the broader community in the DRC and Francophone Africa through bioethics education, research and consultation.

It seeks to fulfill its mission by integrating research ethics and public health ethics courses into the KSPH Master's in Public Health program, strengthening local ethical review of research, teaching bioethics to medical students at the University of Kinshasa, holding regional workshops at health care centers, and offering a two-week intensive bioethics course to Francophone African medical professionals in 2008.

The center also seeks to engage students and faculty members of the faculties of law, medicine and humanities at the University of Kinshasa in ethical discussion and dialogue, and form cooperative institutional ties with these faculties.

• Participating KSPH faculty profiles

Bioethics Center, University of Louvain (Belgium)    

The University of Louvain was founded in 1425 and is one of the most respected universities in Europe. Established in 1986 as one of the first of its kind in Europe, the Bioethics Center is a research, education and resource center within the University of Louvain's Faculty of Medicine. The Center's team promotes a critical and creative dialogue between disciplines relevant to the practice of bioethics: medicine, philosophy, law, psychology, theology, biology, sociology and anthropology.

The Fogarty scholars will study at the Bioethics Center for an academic year. They will then complete Institutional Review Board (IRB) training, curriculum development and bioethics research activities at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, before returning to the Bioethics Center at the School of Public Health in Kinshasa.

• Master's level degree in Bioethics at University of Louvain
• Bioethics Center activities
• Participating faculty profiles
• Affliated Health and Development Program

Organizational Structure of the Partnership

Strengthening Bioethics Capacity and Justice in Health is supported by a partnership between three universities on three continents, and by numerous institutes, faculties and organizations within or affliated with those universities. The general structure of our partnership is represented by the organizational diagram below.