Improving education and research through the Pan American Health and Education Foundation (PAHEF)

A highly productive method for aiding medical education in the Americas has been developed that involves using a revolving fund to buy large quantities of essential textbooks at low cost. The procedure, which utilizes medical schools as intermediaries, has made it feasible to sell books directly to medical students. Establishment of the revolving fund was made possible by a loan of US$2 million from the Inter-American Development Bank. To facilitate the operation an independent nonprofit corporation, the Pan American Health and Education Foundation (PAHEF), was created to receive and administer the funds. The foundation works closely with PAHO. In the first six years since its establishment the PAHEF program has grown rapidly, involving a total of 146 medical schools in the PAHEF-sponsored distribution of 335,000 texts. The program has also been extended successfully to nursing schools, and plans are now underway to extend it still further to a wide variety of other health workers.