The GE Foundation has announced that it will fund the training of a biomedical engineering technician for every hospital in Rwanda. The basis for the training will be a new curriculum developed by undergraduates at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.

Duke biomedical engineering students Allison Keane, Jenna Maloka, Kathleen Murphy and Marian Dickinson are among a team of researchers who developed the curriculum for secondary school graduates. They analyzed reports from several thousand pieces of broken medical equipment to determine why it fails when it arrives in the developing world. They then developed a curriculum based on the knowledge required to return the equipment to service in a resource-poor setting.  Some students conducted this research while spending a summer in Africa with the Duke-Engineering World Health Summer Institute.

Although Rwanda has been experiencing a remarkable recovery from a devastating civil war, the nation still suffers from a severe lack of trained personnel in the health care professions.  There simply aren't enough doctors, nurses or biomedical engineers to keep the health care system operating. In fact, there is no school to train biomedical engineers or biomedical engineering technicians in the country. As a result, The World Health Organization estimates most of the medical equipment in the developing world is not working.