Open Call: East Africa Leadership Journey 2025

Leadership projects are an opportunity for each member to design and lead an effort using their expertise, network, passion, and creativity.

Participants enter the journey with a project idea and, with guidance from mentors, coaches, and African health experts, develop a theory of change, stakeholder analysis, and an action plan. The implementation phase of the project begins later in the journey. Finally, at the Leadership Lift-Off event, each cohort member presents a summary of the project’s development and early results.

Project implementation does not need to be fully completed by the end of the journey and will likely continue after the end of the journey. The 2025 East Africa Leadership Journey will run from March 2025 to February 2026.

theme

• Leadership projects fall into one of four themes:
  • Focusing on the health of women and girls.
  • Facilitates institutional change.
  • Optimizing your path to leadership.
  • Building integrated and resilient health systems.

extortion

• Hybrid Learning: Learning Touchpoints facilitate virtual and in-person group sessions. Cohort members explore leadership frameworks, research, and tools in workshop-style sessions focused on highly interactive learning touchpoints and dynamic practice.
• Virtual Mentorship: Effective women leaders are championed by a strong support network, including mentors. They seek out senior leaders from diverse backgrounds, health fields, and academic disciplines to serve as mentors for their cohort.
• Virtual Coaching: Having a personal leadership coach is important to help you navigate change and adapt to new challenges on your path to a leadership role.
• In-person sessions: ‘Leadership Immersion’ is a three-day experiential gathering held a few months after the start of the journey. Through dynamic discussions and hands-on exercises, cohort members enhance their skills, apply them to real-world cases, and reflect on lessons learned.

rule

• There are only four rules to the Leadership Project:
  • We need to focus on improving outcomes at the intersection of health and gender equality, or take a gender perspective on global health issues.
  • This will allow you to leverage your leadership skills.
  • It should be within your control or influence, but also beyond the demands of your day-to-day job.
  • You have to be passionate about it.

Qualification criteria

• You will be considered if you meet all of the following criteria:
  • Have an identity as a woman.
  • Work in a role focused on public health policy, practice and/or research (your work and partnerships may involve serving populations at the national level in your country of residence or at the regional level in East Africa, practicing public health in hospitals and health centers, generating research and innovation, creating or implementing policy, and managing teams/departments or projects/grants).
  • Middle Manager: Has significant experience (10-20 years) in public health.
  • Live and work in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, Tanzania or Ethiopia.
  • You must be a citizen of one of the six countries.
  • Able to communicate fluently and naturally in written and oral English to express the next steps of emotional processing required for travel.

For more information, please visit: Women Lift Health.