Dear IAPHL Members,
I hope our nearly 8,000 members throughout the world are doing well. We are almost back up to the 8,000 member mark already after purging more than 700 memberships that were either duplicates or no longer with valid email addresses.
Well October was a busy month for the Secretariat. Here is a list of the many activities in which we were involved: conducted the follow-up workshops to the Gender and Inclusion Webinar, helped facilitate, attend, and present at the PtD Indaba held in Zambia, held a pre-conference IAPHL meeting and gave away 20 T-shirts, attended the in-person day long Zambia Country Chapter meeting, conducted interviews for the executive director position, piloted the first Chapter Advocacy Training in-person with our Zimbabwe Country Chapter, held the Francophone Chapter Leaders Meeting, notified the membership about the opportunity to apply to be a member at large on the new Governing Council and have sent out invitations to more than 20 organizations to apply for the organizational memberships.
For those of you who were able to attend, I hope you found the PtD Indaba to be an enriching experience. Our 11 Ambassadors did a fantastic job of elevating the profile of IAPHL. Our Ambassadors from Nepal, Umesh Gupta, and Congo, Ivan Zinga, joined me for the presentation on the great potential of the IAPHL chapters. Many people came up to me afterwards to comment that they had no idea that we had that many country chapters or that the chapters are doing so many great things. Our Ambassador from Zimbabwe, Olga Muza, conducted her own very well received presentation. Our Ambassador from Nepal also joined me for the presentation on youth in Supply Chain. And our community manager, Rachel Simon, our consultant from Zambia, and myself conducted a very well attended short workshop on Supply Chain Advocacy. And I hope everyone saw the numerous postings from the ambassadors during and after the conference.
After Zambia, Rachel, our Zambian consultant and I traveled to Zimbabwe to conduct the first Supply Chain Advocacy Training for our Zimbabwe chapter. The chapter selected a beautiful site along the Mozambique border, in the Vumba Mountains for the training. The group of 15 Zimbabwe members came from really varied backgrounds and worked very hard during the two day workshop. They have already set up to meet again as they follow through on their workplan. We are hoping that additional funding may come next year to allow the secretariat to offer this training to more country chapters.
So the Terms of Reference for the new Governing Council have been finalized. Recently you should have seen the posting for those interested members to apply for the two Members at Large positions on the Council. We have already received over 20 respondents. I have also reached out to more than 25 organizations who work in this field to ask them to apply for the other Council member positions. We are hoping to have at least one member who will represent a ministry of health. If you are in a position to speak to the leadership of your national ministry of health, do encourage them to apply for membership.
We continue to set up interviews for the executive director position. It is taking longer than we had planned. Our hope is to be able to hire a new executive director before the end of the year.
For November, there will be two Supply Chain related conferences. The Health and Humanitarian Logistics Conference will be held in Brussels on November 16 and 17. This will be a hybrid conference: in person and virtual. At the end of this month, I will be attending the Global Health Supply Chain Summit in Dakar, Senegal on November 30, December 1 and 2. As always, I am hoping to meet IAPHL members and introduce others to membership at the conference.
As I end, to highlight the potential for the country chapters again, during our most recent Chapter Leaders Meeting, our new Indonesia Chapter reported having more than 480 people attend their virtual seminar conducted with the MoH on multi-month dispensing policy on ARVs. The other chapters continue to report on their workshops, symposiums, and chapter member meetings.
All the best,
Walter Proper, IAPHL Executive Director