Atai Omoruto Scholarship Award Fund

Working Party News April 2025

April, 2025

Atai Omoruto was a remarkable individual, who had made significant impact on the lives of many people including family physicians. She was a powerful woman whose work had significant influence on many areas of Family Medicine not only within Africa but also globally. She was one of the pioneers in establishing the WONCA Working Party on Women and Family Medicine (WWPWFM) within Africa. To remember her life and legacy in WONCA and WWPWFM, we established a scholarship award for a young African female family physicians or trainee doctors/registrar, who demonstrate clinical excellence, leadership skills and commitment to the community that they serve.

The main purpose of setting up this fund was to offer financial support to an African female family doctor to attend world conferences and enhance her learning experience through regional or global networking.

The reasons for giving this award to a female within Africa are the followings:

Atai Omoruto, a female was from Uganda, Africa. In order to show respect and admiration for her work and celebrate her legacy, this fund has been set up to support young female doctors. This will assist them in having access to regional and global conferences. She wanted was passionate in developing more females into taking up leadership roles in many medical fields.

Africa is one of the most underdeveloped areas in the world, with the lowest GDP. Due to financial constraints, doctors cannot afford to travel in the world for conferences or see modern changes.

Female: Despite being in leadership positions significant African female doctors are still oppressed in many ways. The Working Party would like to reduce this barrier by giving opportunities to encourage, the females’ doctors within Africa to better themselves within the fields of medical education(academic), research and clinical areas. This will improve the overall quality of care to many people including female population.

Young doctors: Scholarships like these will enable young doctors to gain global experience and develop skills and expertise in the field of family medicine

Understanding the context and disease: The family doctors in Africa understand the context and its impact on their population. They would get a chance to learn from other countries during the world conferences is a platform which can provide this exposure.

Benefits of this fund:

Empowering the young Female Family Doctors: The fund will encourage female doctors to take control of their work in the clinical service, teaching and research areas, enabling them to achieve their full potential and reducing the gender bias.

Reducing the financial barriers: Those doctors serve the vulnerable and underserved areas, and they are underpaid. They are mainly doing volunteer services in these areas. This fund will help the winner with the financial cost towards the conference and to see areas beyond Africa.

Building a brighter future: By supporting a female young doctor, the fund is helping to build a brighter future for individuals, communities and society.

Negative impact:

Unavailability of funds: If there is no fund, we will be forced to stop this award. Currently we have 26 applicants for this award, but we don’t have money to fund the winner.

In conclusion, this scholarship award is a testament to the power of clinical service provided to the community with the purpose to improve the life of people and achieve some of the sustainable development goals within Africa.

By providing financial assistance, it empowers a new generation of leaders to make a positive impact within WONCA and the world particularly Africa. As the fund continues to grow, it is likely to have an even greater many more women, to the community and beyond.

On behalf of WONCA & WWPWFM, I plead to everyone reading this article to please donate some money to this fund.

Click here to donate to the Atai Omoruto Scholarship Award Fund