SOUTH AFRICA: From poor to PhD - Gugu Mchunu's story

Not in her wildest dreams, growing up the youngest of 10 children in a deprived rural family on South Africa's east coast, did Gugu Mchunu imagine she would end up with a prestigious PhD fellowship studying in America. "I couldn't afford to go to university," she recalls. But there sits a gleaming Dr Mchunu, 39, in her neat office at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where she lectures in the School of Nursing - one of some 200 South Africans among more than 3,000 once-disadvantaged intellectuals in 22 countries who have been awarded fellowships under the single biggest grant in the Ford Foundation's history.

"I still sometimes think I'm going to wake up," says Mchunu, who obtained her PhD last year with a thesis titled The development and implementation of policy guidelines for health promotion in the workplace. She has produced three new modules - on policy development, on evaluation, and on occupational health and health promotion - based on what she learned at Johns Hopkins university in the US, and a first paper from her thesis will be published by a recognised journal later this year.

Ford's International Fellowship Programme (IFP) was launched in South Africa in 2002. The number of new, current and past scholars now totals 191, according to Louise Africa, director of the programme in South Africa which is administered by the Africa America Institute in Johannesburg. As elsewhere, the aim is to support postgraduate study for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"We have approximately 78 alumni. Most returned to jobs they held prior to their graduate studies. Some were promoted to higher positions while others moved on to other or better jobs," Africa says.

Three quarters of the IFP's South Africa cohort are or were studying for masters and a quarter for PhD degrees, nearly half (48%) are women and 40% are from rural areas. Half took up placements in South Africa, 29% in the UK, and 18% in North America. More than a third work in the area of community development, and Mchunu is among them.

Mchunu's journey to a PhD was long, difficult and circuitous. Born in the small rural community of Emthandeni, north of Durban, her father died when she was seven, plunging the family into deeper poverty. There was no high school in the area but her mother, a small-scale sugar cane farmer, managed to scrape together the money to send her clever daughter to a convent near Pietermaritzburg, capital of KwaZulu-Natal.

"At one point I was sent home because we couldn't pay the fees," she says. "I had wanted to be a doctor or a dentist. But with no money to go to university, I sloped around doing nothing for six months after finishing school."

She finally decided to follow two of her sisters into nursing, and started at the college attached to Edendale Hospital in Pietermaritzburg in 1989 - a state programme that does not require fees and provides student nurses with accommodation and a small wage.

"In January 1990, after completing the first year, five of us trainees were called in by the college principal and told we could enrol at the University of KwaZulu-Natal," Mchunu says.

Great excitement at the prospect of university soon turned sour, as the students arrived at UKZN only to find they needed to start the nursing degree from scratch and to raise R10,000 (US$2,500 at the time) in fees - a massive amount for impoverished families - and a R2,000 deposit immediately to enrol. It was money they did not have but the principal at Edendale gave them each a loan and organised for the students to live at a hospital nearby.

"There was a lot of hardship," Mchunu remembers. But during her first year she successfully applied for a bursary from the Kellog Foundation: "It covered everything - fees, books, accommodation - and was a huge help," she says.

"In the fourth year we went to work with a rural community. I realised that was what I wanted to do, so I specialised in community health." Mchunu completed the degree in 1993, and found an occupational health job involving community work in Kimberley, far away in the Northern Cape. She loved it, especially health in the workplace, and stayed there until 1999.

The head of the School of Nursing at UKZN, Professor Leana Uys - now a deputy vice-chancellor - had kept in touch with Mchunu and asked her several times to take up a lecturing post there. Uys called again one day and told her there was a position in community health. This was her area, and home was beckoning - "one of my sisters was dying, and my mother was getting old" - so she returned to KwaZulu-Natal and began lecturing in 2000. She completed a Masters in 2002, and decided in 2004 to embark on a PhD.

"I had become interested in promoting health in the workplace, which is a neglected area," says Mchunu. "One day a colleague told me of a website with information about a fellowship programme that was looking for academics interested in community development. It was the Ford Foundation programme. I applied, and much to my amazement, I was called in for an interview in mid-2004 and then granted a scholarship. I was very excited."

The programme offers the option of studying at a home university or abroad - or both. With a husband and young children, Mchunu opted to stay in Durban. She took unpaid leave for two years from mid-2005 and spent six months of it at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where she had forged links with colleagues. The time there, she says, was fantastic.

Mchunu studied six modules - in evaluation, policy development, research, health promotion, community development, and occupational health - in the schools of nursing and public health. "I had a great time, though to start with it was difficult to just forget about my family and focus on studies. I met a lot of people - even people who I had been reading in books. It was a real eye-opener. I learned so much about research, and was able to visit other places and learn about workplace health promotion and other things."

Her thesis looked at wellness programmes in different workplaces of various sizes in different sectors, developed policy guidelines that can be used to develop workplace health promotion policies and programmes, and described testing the guidelines in an organisation in Durban. "They were happy," she laughs. "They said I gave them for free what they would otherwise have had to pay a lot of money for."

Mchunu submitted her thesis last year, was awarded her PhD and returned to lecturing. "Now I'm trying to apply what I learned while I was away. I've been given more responsibility at work, I've started the new modules, I'm writing articles and I've been invited by organisations to help develop health policies. It's a lot of work but it's very fulfilling."

One aspect of the Ford fellowship programme Mchunu had not anticipated was its prestige. "If you mention it you get instant respect - everywhere," she says. "Johns Hopkins asked me to advise some of its students on how to apply for fellowships and here I am mentoring other Ford scholars. It's also been exciting to be able to contribute to workplace health promotion - most organisations have focused on safety, but it is even more important to look after all of people's wellness needs. I can't tell you how thankful I am."

karen.macgregor@uw-news.com