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The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study to assess the capacity of a poor country to scale‐up its production of health workers.

The assessment consisted of a survey of institutions training doctors, nurses and technicians in Rwanda. Data on student intake, teaching staff, infrastructures and equipment were collected directly from the institutions by questionnaire administered in person. Data for the qualitative assessment of current and future capacity of production were collected by interviews.

Physical capacity in terms of classrooms and dormitories was generally good, except at the Faculty of Medicine. Laboratories and libraries were considered inadequate everywhere. Few national teachers hold a PhD and dependence on foreign trainers is high. Nursing teachers' training is also insufficient, particularly in pedagogy. As trainers are young, providing them with additional training should be easier. All institutions reported insufficient budgets. Managerial competencies are not developed. There is no licensing mechanism to ensure quality maintenance.

There is no validated data base on training institutions and the research had to rely on self‐reported statistics and other information.

A rapid increase in the production of health personnel would be difficult in the current conditions. Production strengthening should involve stakeholders from training institutions, and include measures to motivate and retain trainers, and to improve the quality of training.

The authors are not aware of similar studies in low income countries. Their methodology can be of interest to researchers and policy‐makers who do not have access to baseline data.

Physicians who are primary care providers in rural communities form an essential stakeholder group in rural mobile health (mHealth) delivery. This study was exploratory in nature and was conducted in Udupi district of Karnataka, India. The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of rural medical officers (MOs) (rural physicians) regarding the benefits and challenges of mobile phone use by community health workers (CHWs).

In-depth interviews were conducted among 15 MOs belonging to different primary health centers of the district. Only MOs with a minimum five years of experience were recruited in the study using purposive and snowball sampling. This was followed by thematic analysis of the data collected.

The perceptions of MOs regarding the CHWs' use of mobile phones were largely positive. However, they reported the existence of some challenges that limits the potential of its full use. The findings were categorized under four themes namely, benefits of mobile phone use to CHWs, benefits of mobile phone-equipped CHWs, current mobile phone use by CHWs and barriers to CHWs' mobile phone use. The significant barriers reported in the CHWs' mobile phone use were poor mobile network coverage, technical illiteracy, lack of consistent technical training and call and data expense of the CHWs. The participants recommend an increased number of mobile towers, frequent training in mobile phone use and basic English language for the CHWs as possible solutions to the barriers.

Studies examining the perceptions of doctors who are a primary stakeholder group in mHealth as well as in the public health system scenario are limited. To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine the perception of rural doctors regarding CHWs' mobile phone use for work in India.