Beyond The Syllabus: Addressing Hidden Curriculum for Equity and Excellence in African Health Professionals Training

This webinar examines why African health professions education continues to show a persistent gap between what is formally taught and what students actually absorb — evidenced by WHO/AFRO data showing only 60% diagnostic accuracy despite full curricula and delivered lectures. Drawing on the "three curricula" framework (formal, informal, and hidden) and evidence from training institutions in Sudan, South Africa, and Nigeria, the session unpacks how unwritten institutional values, colonial-era legacies, and power dynamics between lecturers and students shape professional identity — often more powerfully than the written syllabus itself. The webinar moves across medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, dietetics, radiography, and medical laboratory science, and closes with six concrete strategies educators and institutions can use to make the hidden curriculum visible and transform it — rather than simply add to existing curricula.