Touch Foundation
Since 2010, Goldman Sachs Gives has granted more than $500,000 to the Touch Foundation – the impact of which has been doubled with a 1:1 match by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
In 2013, grants from Goldman Sachs Gives, including the match from USAID, enabled 36 medical students and 10 assistant medical officer students to participate in the external clinical rotations. Further, the specialist physicians teaching these students attended to 2,500 patients during the course of the year.
About the Touch Foundation
The Touch Foundation is creating a unique and scalable model to improve healthcare education and healthcare delivery in Tanzania. Tanzania has one physician for every 20,000 people (versus one for every 400 in the US). In some rural areas, there may be just one doctor for 1,000,000 people. This shortage is a major contributing factor of the high maternal and infant mortality rates in the country and throughout the region. To address this crisis, the Touch Foundation aims to:
- Increase access to training for Tanzanian medical students and assistant medical officer students
- Expose students to diverse clinical settings and cases
- Offer students more opportunities to perform hands-on procedures
All of these activities have a triple benefit – the Touch Foundation is not only increasing the number of trained medical professionals in Tanzania, they are providing high quality care to the patients at a regional/district level through the increased rotations and coursework, and they are improving the skills of the local medical staff on the ground.