Educating and Developing Bioethicists in Tanzania (ENGAGE)

ABSTRACT This application responds to PAR-16-454: International Bioethics Research Training Program (D43) with a focus on bioethics research training in Tanzania. The need for doctoral-trained bioethics scholars and bioethics scholarship in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) is urgent. With the recent emergence of the coronavirus public health pandemic and concerns about the allocation of finite resources, LMICs face daunting challenges when making ethical decisions that affect their citizens. They also face other day-to- day ethical issues in clinical care and clinical research, including informed consent from vulnerable patients, HIV incidence and prevalence, cultural views about decision-making roles, truth-telling to patients and families, and many others. All these areas require educating and developing bioethicists in Tanzania (ENGAGE). We capitalize on nine years of successful interdisciplinary collaboration between Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Services (MUHAS), Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania to prepare a cadre of doctoral prepared bioethics scholars in Tanzania. The collaboration has facilitated the creation, staffing, and demonstrated sustainability and successes of the Department of Bioethics and Health Professionalism in the School of Public Health and Social Sciences. The Department offers the Masters of Bioethics and teaches bioethics across the broad spectrum of degree programs offered at MUHAS. The purpose of this application is to build on this accomplishment and address the need to develop bioethics scholars who can integrate theory, research, and public-health policy and become intellectual and academic leaders in the field of bioethics relevant to the country. To achieve this aim, we propose to: (1) recruit and train six individuals at the doctoral level; (2) prepare the next generation of bioethics scholars who will be at the forefront of scientific inquiry and advancement of the public's health in Tanzania, and (3) develop a sustainable research capacity for bioethics in the region. There is no institution in Tanzania that offers formal bioethics training at the doctoral level. Thus, the country and the region will benefit from doctoral prepared bioethicists who have the skills to address the country's most pressing bioethics and public health-related problems.