Like many African countries, Tanzania faces an acute shortage of health care workers. Low pay, poor working conditions, and limited training programs contribute to the problem, while the rising burden of treating HIV/AIDS patients makes it worse. Indeed, health standards in Tanzania have declined so much that it trails most other developing nations. We estimate that it will have to find nearly 10,000 more workers to address the rising needs of HIV/AIDS patients and three times that number to meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals.¹ Improving the productivity of individual health care workers and of the health care system as a whole could increase its capacity by two-thirds, however, even without additional staff. Some improvements (telephones and motorbikes for better communication, for instance) would be relatively easy to make; others (managing the flow of patients more satisfactorily, and the implementation of planning and accounting tools) would require more investment and training. Health organizations and the government must also increase the capacity of their training programs by at least half to ensure a sustainable workforce and aggressively recruit trained staff to alleviate the immediate shortages.