UAB News reported that neurologists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have built a Neurology Global Health Program in Kijabe, Kenya, pairing direct patient care with training for local doctors in a country that has close to no neurologists for its population. Juliana Coleman, an assistant professor in the UAB Department of Neurology, started the programme with Rebeka Sipma, also an assistant professor in the department, UAB News reported. “People all around the world have brains, and they can all break,” Coleman said.

The gap the programme addresses is specialty care. Primary-care training across the developing world has advanced, Coleman said, and the shortage now sits in specialties, neurology among the sharpest. Kenya has a population of 55 million and, by Coleman’s estimate, 18 to 20 neurologists in the whole country, UAB News reported. Most people who need neurological care will never see a neurologist, she said, and many will never see a provider who has heard a neurologist lecture.

The programme

The first organised visit to Kijabe Hospital took place in July 2024, UAB News reported. Sipma returned in January 2025 and again on a third trip alongside neurology resident Rebecca Massey, spending four weeks in Kijabe and the surrounding areas. The visits run to a set rhythm, the report said, with three clinic days a week and separate days given to lectures. The team works mainly with family medicine residents and clinical officers, many of them from Kenya or from Sudan, South Sudan and Ethiopia.

Both Coleman and Sipma had done medical mission work before joining UAB. Sipma’s college trips to Guatemala and Honduras drew her toward medicine and then toward neurology, UAB News reported. Massey, a fourth-year resident, had done similar work in the Dominican Republic before the Kenya trip.

Diagnosis and treatment with less

The shortage of specialists is compounded by limited equipment and a narrow drug supply, Coleman said. Neurology leans on the clinical exam and the patient history, which can locate a problem without advanced imaging, and that skill carries weight where scanners are scarce. Confirming a diagnosis such as multiple sclerosis is harder without MRI, the report said, and that uncertainty can hold back aggressive treatment.

Treatment choices are narrow in the same way. For epilepsy, Coleman said, a clinic in the United States can choose from about 20 medications, while in Kijabe there are four. Kijabe Hospital, an institution about 110 years old, hosts several residency programmes, and the UAB team also works with neurologists and neurology fellows at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.

Why the gap drives travel

A thin specialty base is one of the standing reasons patients leave a country for care. When a condition cannot be diagnosed or treated at home, the patient who can afford it travels, and the country loses both the case and the fees, while the patient who cannot afford it goes without. Training local clinicians is the slower answer, and the durable one, because a visiting team treats the patients in front of it while a trained resident treats patients for a career. The same logic drives Kenya’s own bid to keep patients in the country, seen in Eldoret’s plan to become a medical tourism hub on the strength of specialised care. It is the model behind cross-border specialty centres elsewhere, such as the neurosurgery centre China and Pakistan have opened to keep complex cases within the region.

What to watch

The measurable test is whether the training compounds. Whether Kijabe and Aga Khan trainees who work with the UAB team go on to practise neurology in Kenya and the wider region, and whether the count of 18 to 20 neurologists rises against a population of 55 million, will show whether the programme built capacity or delivered visits. The number of clinic days and the size of each resident cohort are the near-term figures to watch, because they set how many local clinicians the programme reaches before the next four-week trip.