The maldistribution of health workers between urban and rural or remote areas is a concern in virtually all countries. In Senegal, for example, the Dakar region, which is mostly urban, has more than 60% of the country’s physicians but only 23% of the total population.1 In Canada – where 99.8% of the territory is rural – 24% of the population but only 9.3% of the physicians lived in rural areas in 2006.2 About one half of the world’s population lives in rural and remote areas, but this half is served by only one quarter of the world’s doctors and by less than one third of the world’s nurses.