Child Health and Development Centre (CHDC)
Child Health and Development Centre (CHDC)
Sustainable Development Goals
Vision
To be a Centre of excellence for multi-disciplinary research and training for sustainable wellbeing of children women and communities.
Mission
To promote the wellbeing of children and women in Uganda through multidisciplinary and multi-sectorial, research, teaching, training and strengthening of partnerships between University, Communities and Government.
Background to Child Health and Development Centre.
Child Health and Development Centre (CHDC) was established as a National Capacity Building Unit for Child Survival and Development in 1989 in the Faculty of Medicine, Makerere University. This was as a result of the growing recognition of the need to mobilize and more systematically and effectively involve available expertise within the university in community based activities to promote sustainable child survival and development. This necessitated strong interdisciplinary linkages, training at community level, methods of promoting community empowerment, improved relations between communities and government support services as well as action oriented operational research, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.
Through research, training and community engagement CHDC created opportunities for effective interaction and partnerships between the university (staff and students), communities (involving the people that the capacity building program was to benefit) and the government (from district officials to policy makers). The focus was on the areas of primary health care, primary and non-formal education, nutrition, water and sanitation and women and children’s well-being and development more generally.
CHDC has over the years evolved into a fully fledged university department the School of Medicine, College of Health Sciences with nine full time academic staff. It continues to promote a holistic approach to children, women and communities’ health needs and well-being through interdisciplinary approaches to research and training at community level, promoting community empowerment as well as creating opportunities for effective interaction and partnerships between the university, communities and government. In addition CHDC also continues to strengthen research capacity through research and research training. CHDC’s work is premised on the conviction that children, women and communities’ health needs and well-being go beyond biomedicine, to encompass complexities in families, communities, institutions of care and public policies. This is very much reflected in the research and training projects undertaken by CHDC staff.
Strengthen research capacity through research training.
Within the College of Health Sciences CHDC staff trains and supervises Health Science students on the COBERS program on how to: work closely with community members and district officials in assessing the health situation at the community level, assisting the community and district officials at that level in identifying their health priority needs and problems; analyzing the causes of the problems and formulating possible approaches for their solutions. This involves working with the people at the community level to enable and empower them to solve their own problems and appraising the outcomes of the action-oriented research to guide future direction, sustainability and replication of such efforts. During the training students are equipped with skills in identifying local health problems, seeking scientifically based but simple solutions and assisting in implementation, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms at community level.
INGO with UNESCO Associate Status / ECOSOC Consutative Status