Imagine standing before an audience with just 20 images and six minutes and 40 seconds to argue that the way doctors are trained needs rethinking if we are to meet the challenges of the future of Africa
That was the challenge Dr Dorothy Kamya accepted at the Southern African Association of Health Educationalists (SAAHE) conference in South Africa. As Associate Dean of Postgraduate Medical Education at the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Nairobi, she chose to meet it through PechaKucha, a Japanese-born presentation style. It gives speakers just 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds, where every slide must count.
The conference theme was blunt: Come and challenge us. She responded with a question.
"Are we preparing health care professionals for the world that shaped us, or for the continent that is emerging?"
Kamya graduated from medical school in the 1990s, trained as an anaesthetist and worked abroad before moving to Nairobi, where she has spent nearly two decades shaping how AKU trains its doctors. The question continues to drive her work.
"The 20 ideas in my presentation weren't the only challenges facing Africa; they were simply the 20 I could fit into six minutes and 40 seconds. I could have presented 40."
Her slides traced a continent changing fast: a population mostly under 30 years of age, rapid urbanisation, climate change reshaping disease patterns, non-communicable diseases rising alongside infectious ones and AI transforming healthcare and education.
Medical education, she believes, must keep up. "We inherited much of this curriculum in the 1960s," she said. "Much of the evidence that underpins our teaching comes from the Global North. African voices contribute just 1-3% of the research published in peer-reviewed journals. That imbalance shows up when we use evidence-based data to treat patients.
She's trying to close that gap directly. AKU's undergraduate medical programme, which Kamya helped design, is just three years old, with its first cohort yet to graduate. It was built with a conscious decision not to replicate old patterns.
"There's no point saying I want to teach about infectious diseases if I'm not sure how climate, urbanisation and changing demographics affect the way infectious diseases are manifesting.
That thinking extends beyond disease patterns. Training tomorrow's doctors, she argues, means understanding the policy, financing, and health systems that shape patient care every day. It's a lesson she resisted at first. "I hated talking about money, but you can't separate health care from financing. Decisions made outside the consulting room have a direct impact on patient care."
Still, the greatest reward of her career is watching former trainees become leaders across the continent.
"We don't have the luxury of large numbers of health care workers in Africa. Every person we train has the potential to make a real difference."
While refining her presentation, however, the most thought-provoking questions came from an unexpected place. Her 13-year-old daughter listened as she explained one of her slides.
"You say 75 per cent of Africa's population is under 30. Why is that a problem?" she asked.
Finding an answer without relying on academic language forced her to sharpen her thinking. It reminded her that the strongest ideas are not necessarily the most complex.
They are the ones people can understand and remember. That, in many ways, became the real value of the presentation's short time.
More than three decades in, Kamya remains convinced Africa has the creativity and leadership to shape its own future in health care education.
She hopes every educator leaves asking the same question that anchored her talk: Are we educating healthcare professionals for yesterday's realities, or tomorrow's Africa?
