Dear IAPHL Members,
Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year for those of you who follow this calendar! Well we had a very busy past year. Let us start with some statistics:
- We added 1,457 new members last year!
- The percentage of women to men moved up two points, so now we have 32% women and 68% men for those who self-identified.
- Percentage of Members by Continent
Africa – 71%
Asia – 11%
Europe – 5%
South/Central America & Caribbean – 1%
North America – 9%
Middle East – 2%
Oceana – 1%
Nigeria remains the country with the largest amount of members at 1,868. The other countries in the top 5 are the following: US at 692, Zimbabwe (which now has a new chapter) at 484, Ethiopia at 393, and India at 360.
We have also added eleven new country chapters this year with nine of them recently joining, all of them from Francophone countries. Many of the chapters made use of their small grants to revive their chapters. Of the 36 chapters on our list, six of them have gone dormant. We are hoping that at least a few of them will revive themselves this year.
Throughout 2022, IAPHL’s social media presence continued to grow on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – especially in terms of engagement. Our engagement rate for all three platforms increased since 2021, indicating that our members are actively engaged with the community on social media through likes, comments, shares, and clicks.
- Facebook: 4.37% in 2021 to 57.71% in 2022 (industry standard around 3%)
- Twitter: 2.88% in 2021 to 6.49% in 2022 (industry standard around 1.5%)
- LinkedIn: 6.67% in 2021 to 7.56% in 2022 (industry standard around 2%)
We saw a large increase in engagement during the PtD Indaba conference, as we shared learnings from the conference and our IAPHL Ambassadors.
Followers for each platform also increased this year with the largest being a 114% increase in LinkedIn followers (715 in 2021 to 1,529 in 2022). The LinkedIn group also continues to grow and currently has more than 2,300 members.
As you know, we were able to award some of our chapters small grants under our grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The program has now ended. We were able to award 25 small grants to 17 countries: a few countries were able to apply for follow-on grants. We have really seen this program as quite a success and I hope that there will be future funding in the coming year to continue it.
The new executive director search continues. We are now forming the final interview committee made up of the Secretariat, JSI, USAID and two members of the current Advisory Group. I am hoping that we will be able to select the new executive director in the coming two weeks.
Wishing all of the members of IAPHL a great new year!
Walter Proper, IAPHL Executive Director