A Beacon Of Hope: Building Guinea's Next Generation Of Dentists

My name is David Ugai. I'm the country director for Guinea, for Mercy Ships International and also the dental specialty consultant for the organization. Mercy Ships is a nonprofit faith based organization. We have two large hospital ships. They're the largest civilian hospital ships in the world. They provide free surgical services for the population.

There's major issues when it comes to oral health care, oral health care services in Guinea and just the region surrounding Guinea. In general, you could estimate that there's somewhere between three hundred to four hundred dentists that are practicing in Guinea. And so you're talking that small group of people are responsible for treating the whole population. Some of these ratios are getting close to one per one million or one per five hundred thousand persons. You're tenfold, a hundredfold off of the actual ratio of what is considered acceptable for access to oral health care. You can only fix the problem if you go as upstream as possible of what the problem is. We don't have enough dentists.

One way to solve that is opening up, developing, and creating dental education systems to create those dentists, those dental health care providers. That is what investing in dental education does.

When Mercy Ships and Dr. Ugai approached us several years ago with this dream that they had for building a dental school in Guinea, we were all in. And the opportunity really spoke to us because it's rooted in solving this foundational issue when it comes to access to care. If we don't train up a new generation of dentists and hygienists, we're never going to treat people's oral healthcare needs. And the way that we could contribute is to provide them with equipment that's tested for durability and tested for reliability to set up this next generation of dentists and hygienists for success.

We based our whole program off of that equipment. We based the whole expansion of our program and entering into other countries and developing other dental schools, based on that equipment.

My challenge to companies is if you have the opportunity to be part of this other system that exists, whether it's in America or outside America, it doesn't matter, just people helping people, I feel like it's part of every human obligation to do what we can to help another person.

What's really amazing is that in a short number of years, Mercy Ships and Dr. Ugai have created something truly remarkable. This dental school has become a beacon of hope in the region. Schools in neighboring countries look to this program as the model of success. And it took a lot of different companies and individuals contributing whatever they could bring for it to be successful.

But there's still a need, and there's still opportunity for those in the dental industry to give back. There's need everywhere in the world, right? And a lot of times we feel like one person cannot make a difference, And I don't think that's true. I just want to say thank you to A-dec for your support, helping and supporting Mercy Ships in our mission to serve and treat the African populations where we visit in oral health care needs. We appreciate everything that you have done for us. We cherish you as a partner and without your support, we could not do what we're doing.