By Rachel Simon on October 6th, 2022

Dear IAPHL Members,

I hope this October letter finds you well. We have been very busy in September with a few things.

A lot of effort has gone into taking an active part in the planning and design of the upcoming PtD Indaba that will take place in Zambia in October on the 12th and 13th.  For those of you able to attend, we will hold an IAPHL Meeting for interested nonmembers and those who are already members.  It will be held on the Tuesday, the 11th, at 18:30 in the evening, the day before the actual conference begins.  Please do plan to attend this one hour meeting if you can; it will be great to see people in person. We will be giving out IAPHL T-shirts to the first 20 people who arrive! Currently there is an estimated count of 200 people who are registered for the conference and I am sure that a large percentage of them are IAPHL members.

We conducted our webinar on Gender and Inclusion. More than 66 people applied to be part of the three follow-up workshops.  There is a good mix of women and men with varying roles in supply chain, coming from 11 countries and from diverse organizations and government institutions.  For those attending the workshops, I hope that your expectations are met.  The participants stated objectives were the following:

  • Help planning and implementing gender inclusive interventions
  • Learn ways to recruit and make the supply chain work sector more compelling for women
  • Building a deeper understanding of gender issues throughout the supply chain to inform and influence decision making, policy, recruitment, budgeting, and M&E efforts.

We continue to move forward with the creation of a new Governing Council.  The Advisory Group came together to review and approve the Terms of Reference for the Council.  Currently the application forms for organizations and the two members at large to apply to be on the council are under consideration.  We hope to be accepting applications in October. If you are aware of any ministries of health that would like to be considered for membership, please let the secretariat know: iaphl@jsi.com.

We have also selected our candidates for the executive director position.  We expect to have the first set of interviews in October.

As I end, I want to thank the Partnership for Supply Chain Management (PfSCM) and the GHSC Summit for being sponsors again of IAPHL!

Walter Proper, IAPHL Executive Director

From the Desk of the ED IAPHL: October 2022