Faculty of Health Sciences strives to make a difference locally and internationally

The faculty continuously increases access, student throughput and diversity. In 2010 Douna Granga arrived in South Africa from his home country of Chad, where he was a district manager. Chad is a developing country in Central Africa, with French and Arabic as its official languages. He had to start learning English and was assisted in this regard by Prof Danie Lombard, as the University of Pretoria has an institutional commitment to ensuring an integrated and inclusive learning experience for all students. After many attempts at the primary and final exams in paediatrics, he finally completed his training in 2015 with a MMed thesis entitled ‘The impact of highly active antiretroviral therapy on the burden of bacterial lower respiratory tract infections in children’. This was published in the South African Medical Journal.

Dr Douna is currently a Fellow in Neonatology at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. He completed his MMed in Paediatrics at the same institution in June 2015. He is looking forward to completing a PhD in Sweden, where he will be investigating tools aimed at reducing the neonatal mortality in low income countries; to less than 10/1000 live births as stipulated in the Sustainable Development Goals, to which the University of Pretoria subscribes. Despite the obstacles and challenges he has faced, Dr Douna has made an enormous contribution to the care of children in Africa and has proudly used the University of Pretoria as a platform to do so.