Having adequate numbers of qualified human resources for health (HRH) is essential for any effective health care system. However, there is a global shortage of skilled health care workers, especially in Sub-Saharan African countries. This shortage is exacerbated by a disproportionately high rate of infectious diseases, the burden of emerging chronic non-communicable diseases, and the emigration of medical doctors. Botswana has also experienced this critical shortage of doctors for many years. To address the shortage, the country in the 1990s embarked on an aggressive program to train its students at foreign medical schools. Despite intensified training, many graduates have not returned. As a result, the country decided to establish a medical school within Botswana. The newly established school was awarded a grant from the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), which has helped to accelerate the school’s development. This paper describes the authors’ experiences, highlighting curriculum, staffing, infrastructure approaches, key successes, and challenges encountered. The paper concludes by proposing solutions. The authors’ experiences and the lessons learned can inform colleagues in other countries considering similar endeavors.

The benefits of all-day kindergarten are increasingly supported by educational policy groups. Rigorous, prospective empirical research is impractical for schools of limited fiscal means where education must take priority over institutional research. However, post-hoc analyses of archival and informal measures can provide invaluable information concerning educational issues of national concern. A method of university and elementary school collaboration was employed in evaluating the educational effects of a transition from half-day to full-day kindergarten in an economically challenged suburban-rural school district in Maine. A child developmental scale and educational measures were used to evaluate differences in improvement scores between children enrolled in half-day kindergarten one year and children enrolled in full-day kindergarten the following year. Additional measures addressed parent and teacher attitudes toward full-day kindergarten. Overall, children enrolled in full-day kindergarten showed greater improvement than children in half-day kindergarten. Results of teacher and parent questionnaires indicated a high degree of satisfaction with full-day kindergarten. The research effort, based on a service learning model, provided a costeffective strategy for recovering and analyzing archival data.

University students can experience many challenges writing for academic purposes as they move from secondary to post-secondary  studies. Both first and additional language users of English experience these challenges, resulting in universities across the globe  instituting different modalities to help ease students’ transitions. In South African universities, despite English being the medium of instruction, most students are additional language speakers of English. This article discusses findings from a 2019 study that investigated three questions: 1) Do firstyear, additional language users of English choose to engage in translanguaging when presented with such an opportunity in their university courses? 2) If they choose to use this tool, how do they employ the genre conventions and discourse  markers of the traditional academic essay? 3) What are their reactions to being presented with the opportunity to use translanguaging in their academic studies? The findings illustrate that approximately half of the study’s participants chose to employ translanguaging in their responses and were able to successfully use the genre conventions and discourse makers of the academic essay.

Researchers from various disciplines have become interested in the supposedly extreme differences in rates of research between academics situated in the Global North and South, specifically those on the African continent. Yet, having worked as a researcher and a writing coach in the context of one university in the southern African region for the past three years, I cannot identify with many of the explanations given for these differences in rates. So, by reflecting on two instances emerging from my own experiences as a researcher in this particular context, this Note from the Field discusses the important and critical role context needs to have in making sense of this phenomenon.