2024 East Africa Signature Leadership Journey

The Signature Leadership Journey is a transformational learning and development experience that brings together mid to senior career women working across multiple disciplines, fields, and sectors in health. This Journey is aimed at creating the mindset shift needed to solve complex challenges that they are facing in global public health today.

Project Themes

Projects should lie at the intersection of health equity and gender equality. They should fall into four themes:

• Centering women and girls in health
• Catalyzing institutional change
• Optimizing pathways to leadership
• Building integrated & resilient health systems.

Elements of the Program

• Hybrid Learning:
  • Learning Touchpoints are facilitated, virtual and in-person group sessions. Cohort members explore leadership frameworks, research & tools in highly interactive learning touchpoints and workshop-style sessions focused on dynamic practice. The touchpoints focus on personal & professional growth, relevant topics and priorities for health leadership, as well as their Leadership Projects. These sessions allow the cohort to share with and learn from each other.
• Virtual Mentorship:
  • Effective women leaders are championed by a network of strong supports, including that of mentors. They identify senior-level leaders from different backgrounds, health sectors, and disciplines to serve as mentors to the cohort. Mentoring groups, comprised of several cohort members and one mentor, are grouped based on complementary backgrounds and professional trajectory. Cohort members will be able to rely on their mentor as a technical and career resource during the Journey.
• Virtual Coaching:
  • Having a personal leadership coach is critical in helping navigate change and adapting to new challenges on the path towards leadership roles.
  • Cohort members are paired with an executive coach who works one-on-one with them to build on their strengths and address areas for growth. Leadership style assessments, including a “360-rater evaluation”, will inform these conversations and enhance each participant’s understanding of their own leadership skills. With this gift of feedback and support from their coach, participants can decide which leadership competencies to focus on, paving the road for them to be a more powerful and effective leader.
  • The combination of mentors and coaches is powerful as women prepare for the next level of their career, providing both professional connections and transformational leadership guidance.
• In-Person Sessions
  • The ‘Leadership Immersion’ is a 3-day experiential convening that takes place a few months into the Journey. Through dynamic discussions and hands-on exercises, cohort members enhance their skills, apply them to real-world examples, and reflect on lessons learned. A series of powerful conversations will complement the instruction, featuring eminent figures in global health who have led transformational change.
  • The 2-day ‘Leadership Lift-Off’ event at the end of the Journey celebrates the cohort’s growth as they ‘lift off’ to a new phase of their leadership. Cohort members will reflect on their leadership evolution through the course of the year and present their Leadership Projects to their peers as well as other global health audiences.

Cost Covered

• Free (all program costs, including travel and lodging, are covered).
• Program Duration: February 2024-March 2025.

Project Impact

• Develop Yourself: Scope, Skills, Lens
  • Develop or enhance a leadership skill
    • Influence, Trust, and Collaboration – Strive to engage others, believe in, them and get things done through partnership and collaboration
    • Presence – Set goals for communicating your ideas more effectively
    • Vision – Cultivate your idea into a broader and more inclusive vision
  • Add another lens to your thinking
    • Diversity – The presence of and respect for difference
    • Equity – The recognition that resources and opportunities are not allocated equally to all
    • Inclusion – Being intentional about welcoming and including a diversity of people and perspectives
• Develop Others: Individuals, Institutions, Society
  • Individuals — Could your project include mentoring or sponsoring others?
  • Institutions — Are there learnings and experiences you could take back to your team or institutional leaders?
  • Society — How can you add to the public discourse, advocacy and representation agenda, or thought leadership around your project idea?

Project Expectations

• Answering a research question
• Promoting health or gender education in a particular group
• Developing a new or better technology
• Innovating a better way to collect/analyze/use health/gender data
• Improving a gender or health-related process/system in your organization
• Empowering or enabling women in your community or organization to be successful
• Incorporating a gendered lens into a policy, practice or research project where it was absent.

Project Rules

• It should focus on improving outcomes at the intersection of health and gender equality, or take a gendered lens on a global health issue
• It should leverage your leadership skills
• It should be within your scope of control or influence, but also stretch you beyond your day-to-day work requirements.

Eligibility Criteria

• You are eligible for consideration if you meet all of the following criteria:
  • Identify as a woman
  • Work in a role that focuses on public health policy, practice, and/or research (your work and partnerships serve populations at the national level in your country of residence or East Africa regional level and may include practicing public health in hospitals and health centers, producing research and innovation, creating or implementing policy, and managing teams/departments or projects/grants.)
  • Mid-Career Leader: Possess sufficient years (10 – 20 years) of experience in public health
  • Reside and work within Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan or Tanzania
  • Must be a national of one of the five countries
  • Possess fluency and ease in written and verbal communication in English to express the next level of emotional processing required for the Journey
• They require participants to be living in the Central Africa (CAT) or East Africa (EAT) time zones for at least 75% of the program as they believe time zone compatibility is essential to your ability to participate at the touchpoints and to engage with your peers within and outside of the sessions. WomenLift Health is committed to selecting diverse cohort members, representing different sectors (public, private, academia, NGO, philanthropy), disciplines, and cultural backgrounds.

For more information, visit WomenLift Health.