Dear IAPHL Members,
I hope this monthly letter finds you all well. It was a busy February for the IAPHL Secretariat.
We have continued our recruitment efforts to hire a new global community manager. We expect to hold our interviews in March and have a decision before the end of the month.
We began the developing our proposals to USAID for possible funding for the new USG Fiscal Year: October 2023 to September 2024. As you may be aware, our USAID funding has been critical to fund the base for IAPHL’s secretariat work.
We will be submitting our final report to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in March for their generous grant. The grant allowed us to provide ambassadorships to the PtD Indaba as well as paid for numerous registrations for our members to attend other conferences virtually. We were also able to offer our members our Gender and Inclusion webinar with the follow-up series of workshops. And for so many of our country chapters, our Foundation funding allowed us to support them with small grants that have been very empowering. So many of the chapters were able to better meet the needs of their country members with educational and engagement activities.
As part of our new three-year strategy, we held the first meeting of the Governing Council. It was very well attended. There was a lot of great discussion and suggestions from the council members. The in-coming executive director, Timi Omali was also able to attend. I was very encouraged that one of the suggestions from council members was to not only submit a yearly workplan with the activities that are funded, but also with activities that we would like to be doing that will need funding. So, we will be convening a smaller group of council members to work with the secretariat to develop a new format for the annual workplan and to determine the activities to be part of that plan.
We will be holding a very brief webinar on Supply Chain Advocacy, highlighting our work with the Zimbabwe chapter to develop their national advocacy plan.
And finally, I hope to introduce the new executive direct via a spotlight interview in March.
All the best,
Walter Proper, IAPHL Executive Director