Dear IAPHL Members,
Happy New Year. For those of you who participated in the holidays in December, I hope that they were safe and had enjoyable days.
As expected, December was not a month with a lot of activities. However, we did conduct our second for the year, IAPHL Advisory Group virtual meeting. The secretariat was able to review the year’s activities and present the new workplan and budget to this group. One of the updates to the group was that we currently have 22 active country chapters and that we are still working on re-engaging a few countries that have not been active for a while. As part of our Gates grant, we hope to better support our chapters and to have other countries start their chapters. I think the chapters present an excellent avenue to get the voice from the field out to our global group. We plan to have our call with the chapter leaders on the 12th.
In terms of membership, we continue to grow. We had over 700 new members join us in 2020. Current membership is over 8,000 and from 152 countries. Percentage wise, we continue to have 70% of our members from Africa. From completed questionnaires, men represent 69% of members, women represent 30% and 1% did not want to identify. Here is a chart with the top ten countries in terms of membership:
As I hope you saw in our listserv submission earlier, the USAID funded assessment team has developed a short survey that went out to all members. Please do take some time to complete the survey by following is the link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FDYBX7F.
As in past months, we continued with our Chapter Leader Spotlight Series. In December, we posted my interview of Yukabeth Otieno from Kenya and Umesh Kumar Gupta from Nepal. As always, if you have missed any of these short interviews, you can find them on the IAPHL website.
Looking forward to a new year, one in which I hope that we are able to see most of our populations vaccinated against Covid-19.
Please stay safe,
Walter