Dear IAPHL Members,
Finally, some more discussions on the listserv from the community! I hope that more members will offer their own questions and ideas so that the community can share their experiences in our community of practice.
We have also been hearing a bit more from our country chapters. We have learned from our ThinkPlace conducted assessment that members who belong to local country chapters feel more engaged with IAPHL. We currently have 22 country chapters. Here is the list of country chapters with some more active than others: Angola, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, US, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All chapters need people to join, participate, and possibly help with the revival of a dormant chapter.
If you are in a country without a chapter, all it takes is someone to show interest and gather a few others to join. You can always reach out to the secretariat for guidance: iaphl@jsi.com.
Recently in response to a couple of requests, we held our first Chapter Leaders Meeting for Francophone countries in French. We have been holding a monthly chapter leaders meeting in English and now we will do so specifically for our French speaking chapters. An opportunity for the secretariat staff to use their dormant French!
A reminder: You can control how the listserv communication comes to you! First, you can set in your profile on the website, which language you wish to receive member’s contributions. You can select English, French, Spanish or Portuguese. Second, you can go to preferences, and decide on the frequency for receiving emails. You can decide to receive those immediately, daily, weekly, or monthly.
As part of our GATES grant, we have been able to offer small grants to our country chapters. So far, we have approved grants to our Ethiopia, Burundi, Ghana, Nepal and South Africa Chapters. We hope to approve a few others in the next couple of months.
Finally, the secretariat is preparing to hold our Advisory Group Meeting on July 15th. We plan to have our consultant group, ThinkPlace, to present the findings of the human centered assessment. I am sure that in the coming months we will be reaching out to the overall membership to share some of the findings from the assessment and discuss what IAPHL may be doing in the future.
Wishing you all the best,
Walter Proper