Dean’s Message

Gondar, the capital of the then-Bagemider and Samen Province, had been the imperial capital of Ethiopia from the early decades of the seventeenth century to the rise of Addis Ababa in the 1890s. The road to the establishment of the Public Health College (PHC) and Training Center (TC) as a College was paved by the “Point Four General Agreement for Technical Cooperation between the United States of America and the Ethiopian Empire.” The work of the Department of Community Health steadily grew into the School of Public Health in 2000 and the Institute of Public Health (IPH) in 2010. This re-establishment was done to tackle the challenges in public health practices of the community, and compete with the advances in the training and service levels in our society.

Currently, the IPH is working vibrantly on teaching by running undergraduate and postgraduate programs (including PhD Programs), research focusing on societal problem-solving research, and community service interventions engaging with local, national and international collaborations. The IPH comprises 8 departments (Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Health Systems and Policy, Reproductive Health, Human Nutrition and “Dietetics”, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, Health Officer, Health Informatics, and Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences), team training program and Dabat Research centre.

The IPH also works on philosophy of 360-degree learning: from seniors, equals, juniors, students, community, organizations, to acquire knowledge and quest of wisdom. This philosophy is augmented with level of maturation of PhD students in four steps such as; entry and concentration, maturation in theory and methods; maturation of application of methods, maturation in synthesis, interpretation and communication. The IPH is also works in building up scientific culture on originality, independence such as free inquiry, free thought, free speech, tolerance and the willingness to decide disputes on the basis of evidences.