About Us

Our mission is to advance equitable access to high-quality dental education throughout Africa. By investing in people and reinforcing education systems that endure, we aim to cultivate a skilled oral health workforce capable of improving health outcomes and transforming the future of dentistry on the continent.

Our vision is a self-sustaining dental education ecosystem across Africa - where every nation can develop, equip, and retain the oral health workforce needed to ensure equitable access to care.

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Our Why

Africa faces a critical shortage of oral health professionals, driven by an insufficient number of dental schools and significant deficiencies in educational infrastructure, faculty, and training resources. Many institutions lack the facilities and technology required for effective clinical, simulation, and practice-based learning. As a result, the continent’s oral health workforce remains underdeveloped, leaving millions without access to essential dental care and contributing to preventable oral diseases that impact overall health and quality of life.

Oral health is now recognized as a global health crisis. The World Health Organization reports that oral diseases affect 3.5 billion people — nearly half of the world’s population — making them the most common non-communicable disease worldwide. And the numbers are only rising, due in part to the lack of a specialized workforce.

In Burkina Faso, 32 dentists care for a population of 18 million. And in Sierra Leone, just 10 dentists serve more than 8 million people.

By comparison, the United States has nearly 200,000 dentists for a population of 335 million which means that some African countries have thousands of times fewer dentists per person than the U.S.

Without strong national dental schools, countries cannot train the workforce required to meet population oral health needs. This shortage drives preventable pain, infection, malnutrition, and long-term oral health complications.

We are committed to supporting every African country in establishing self-sustaining, fully functional, and well-equipped dental schools. Every nation should be capable of educating and retaining its own oral health workforce — without long-term reliance on external support.

Dental Capacity addresses oral health workforce challenges at their source. In countries with existing dental infrastructure, we collaborate with school deans, local leaders, and governments to strengthen institutional capacity, optimize training programs, and overcome systemic barriers. In nations without a dental school, we partner with health authorities to assess workforce needs, identify strategic opportunities, and implement sustainable infrastructure and education programs that ensure the long-term development of a self-sufficient oral health workforce.

Read about our approach to lasting change.

Our Story

Dental Capacity was founded in 2022 by Dr. David Ugai, a dentist from Minnesota.

David first began working in the oral health field in Guinea in 2012. While volunteering with an international medical charity as a dentist, he saw the staggering need for greater access to quality care firsthand. As he and his team began providing direct patient care, they saw the lines only continued to grow over time. Looking upstream, David realized that the root cause was a lack of training programs equipped to properly educate local providers – leaving entire populations without the care they needed.

He began wondering how to solve this problem for good.

By 2018, David had returned to Guinea and began leading the renovation of the Université Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry’s dental school as Mercy Ships Country Director. For years, he worked with university leadership to transform the dental school by introducing hands-on clinical training, mentoring students closely and renovating the simulation-lab and state-of-the-art clinic spaces. By developing relationships with local healthcare and university leaders, while walking side-by-side with students in clinical training, they began seeing real results. Over time, the model evolved to include sponsoring students to specialize internationally in Africa so they could return to the university as teachers.

The project now hosts dental students from all over the continent and is poised to change Guinea’s dental education system long into the future.

This model became David’s foundation for Dental Capacity. Inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela - “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” - David officially created Dental Capacity in 2022 with the goal of making quality dental education accessible in every African country.

In 2024, David was awarded the Global Achievement Award by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, having trained around 1,200 professionals and overseen 41,000 dental procedures. David currently is adjunct faculty at Université Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry and University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine.