Based in western Massachusetts, a nonprofit made up of medical professionals is once again journeying to Uganda. Their mission: help equip local health care workers and midwives looking to make a difference in their stretch of the country.
As organizers tell WAMC, their annual trip comes with added importance, especially after the withdrawal of USAID.
Small in size but big in mission, the Northampton-based group “Well On Their Way” has been making yearly, multi-week trips to part of Northern Uganda.
While the heavily-populated Gulu City sits to its southwest, much of the landlocked-Gulu district is made up of rural villages and farms, with limited access to health care centers.
But as retired physician Dr. Ann Markes tells WAMC, there are a number of midwives, nurses and other volunteers looking to bridge gaps in the district. Helping them on their way is one of her organization’s goals.
“… we [use] a trainer-of-trainer model, meaning, we go in, train a certain group of people to be trainers ... watch them train their colleagues and after we [leave], they'd train over 100 additional providers,” the group’s executive director explains. “When I say ‘providers,’ I’m not talking about doctors. This area of 135,000 people is serviced by two doctors. Basically, almost all of the care is given by nurses, midwives and clinical officers.”
Along with a team of other volunteers from the Northeast and beyond, Markes and her husband, Dr. Matthew Kane, are currently en route to Gulu once again. The two Florence, Mass. residents spoke with WAMC before their latest trip - one packing special meaning and support this time around.
On top of being picked for an International Community Access to Child Health grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the group also received sizable gifts totaling about $29,000.
It’s enough to launch an “obstetric ultrasound training initiative” in the district, complete with four portable ultrasound machines.
Markes and Kane say the Gulu district currently has only “one outdated, non-portable ultrasound machine and a single trained midwife sonographer serving approximately 6,000 pregnant women each year.”
The donations will allow for ten midwives to enroll in online training, in addition to hands-on instruction.
Markes and Kane say the trainees are always charged and ready to take on whatever training and support comes during the group’s visits.
“In general, we work with about six trainers and they provide training to over 100 healthcare providers," she says. "In addition, approximately 20 new healthcare providers get hired each year - there's a fair amount of turnover. We make sure that they get trained in all of the six programs that we've rolled out on an annual basis… we've also trained 180 village health team members.”
This, as the region still deals with last year’s departure of USAID support, leaving the country’s Ministry of Health scrambling as programs ranging from malaria to HIV/AIDS prevention are cut. The fallout of the cuts hasn’t totally come into focus yet, but the doctors tell WAMC they are manifesting.
“Every year, the Ministry of Health hires approximately 20 new healthcare providers in the district and the problem is, with the budget being stretched so much, they did not have the resources to be able to hire new people," Kane says. "They were somewhat understaffed before, but now, because they've been unable to hire new people and [there’s] a small amount of attrition, they are now fairly-significantly understaffed.”
Outlets such as The Guardian report the withdrawal in aid has affected numerous initiatives in the country, like the World Food Programme, which had to cut food distribution to a million refugees in Uganda early last year.
It’s also a country that is still feeling effects of a lengthy war involving Uganda’s military and the Lord’s Resistance Army, led then by Joseph Kony. While the worst of the violence has been over for nearly two decades, Dr. Joshua Miller says the aftermath can still be seen and felt across the district, especially in its health care system.
“It ended pretty much in 2007 as far as the actual conflict goes, but the effect of it still reverberates throughout this area,” Miller says, describing how the Gulu district and other parts of Northern Uganda some of the most intense fighting. “‘Well on Their Way’ is dealing with one of the [medical] areas that is most critical worldwide, but particularly in this area, which is infant and maternal health.”
A professor emeritus at Smith College’s School for Social Work, Miller’s work has included studying the impact and trauma armed conflicts can have on communities – particularly Northern Uganda.
An experienced social worker, he’s responded to major disasters and catastrophes over the years, including time in Northern Uganda in 2007, when the earliest rebuilding efforts were underway.
At the time, he and his colleagues had been developing a support model that could help communities well after international aid workers depart.
“The model was: how can we build on the traditions, the resources, the practices, the beliefs, the worldviews of people who have experienced a catastrophe like the war in Northern Uganda, and what that meant was not going in and saying, ‘Okay, this is what Western science has taught us about how you have to do things,’ but more to try to empower local people to take charge of their own lives and to help them to get past an impasse," Miller adds. "Because when there’s a hurricane, a war, a tsunami – it overwhelms the community and people lose touch with [the] kind of cultural practices that have sustained them for hundreds of years.”
Years later, a special training of trainer persists in Gulu. Miller would go on to co-found “STEP-Up Uganda” – STEP standing for “Sustain, Train, Educate and Promote.” From that would come “Well On Their Way” in 2023.
While the group’s work is not directly affected by recent USAID the cuts, working in the shadow of the cuts only makes the group’s work more important, its members contend.
They tell WAMC more updates are to come.
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This piece originally aired on Friday, Feb. 20, 2026
