Apply for Nigeria Signature Leadership Journey 2025

In this fully-funded, 12-month Leadership Journey, they provide mid-career women the safe space to explore their authentic leadership through vulnerability and reflection, an inclusive and diverse network which fosters a strong sense of belonging, tools and strategies for enhancing their voice, presence, and influence – all the while being supported by a powerful group of peers, mentors, and coaches.

Participants engage in two in-person experiential learning residencies (Immersion and Lift-Off), in addition to virtual learning touchpoints, virtual group mentoring, virtual one-on-one coaching sessions, and importantly, a self-directed leadership project – all the while being supported by their Leadership Journey community and experts in the health sector.

Alumnae will be part of a lifelong network of allies at local, regional, and global levels who continue to support each other and new cohort members (for example, as mentors) and to advocate for women’s leadership.

The Leadership Project is an opportunity for each member to design and lead an effort that taps into their expertise, network, passion, and creativity. Participants enter the Journey with a project idea and develop a Theory of Change, stakeholder analysis, and implementation plan with the guidance of their mentor, coach, and African health experts. The implementation phase of the project begins in the latter half of the Journey. Finally, at the Leadership Lift-Off event, each cohort member presents a summary of their project’s development and early outcomes.

Aim

• Your Leadership Project could accomplish one or more of the following, but is not limited to:
  • 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

Themes

• Leadership Projects fit into one of four themes:
  • Centering women and girls in health
  • Catalyzing institutional change
  • Optimizing pathways to leadership
  • Building integrated & resilient health systems

Program Specifications

• Hybrid Learning: Learning Touchpoints are facilitated, virtual and in-person group sessions.
• Virtual Mentorship: Effective women leaders are championed by a network of strong supports, including that of mentors.
• Virtual Coaching: Having a personal leadership coach is critical in helping navigate change and adapting to new challenges on the path towards leadership roles.
• In-Person Sessions: The ‘Leadership Immersion’ is a 3-day experiential convening that takes place a few months into the Journey.

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 Nigeria 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 Nigeria
  • Must be a national of Nigeria
  • 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 West Africa Standard Time 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, Research and development), disciplines, and cultural backgrounds.

Rules

• There are only four rules for the Leadership Project:
  • 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
  • You should be passionate about it.

For more information, visit WomenLift Health.