NEED FOR DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCIES FOR HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE IN NIGERIA

The advancement of health promotion in Nigeria as a public health strategy has maintained a slow pace basically due to dearth of health promotion workforce to reach the teeming population of the country. With the need for increase in health promotion workforce in the country, this paper establishes the necessity to form linkages between academia and health promotion practice as a fast means of reaching this need. The paper sees the need to build and strengthen the existing workforce, and build the capacity of academic health promotion through staff training programmes and academic programmes. Achieving this will depend so much on the development of a set of competencies that would guide the training programmes as well as curriculum development in tertiary institutions. With the globally identified competencies as guide, this paper suggests the way forward for competency development in Nigeria. It, therefore, concludes that Nigeria has the need and an existing framework for development of competencies for health promotion practice and, therefore, recommends that international agencies like the World Health Organisation (WHO) should assist Nigeria in carrying out this project.