Since Liz became CEO, we have been on a deliberate journey to strengthen and diversify our leadership structure and team to better fulfill our mission. Prioritizing proximity and lived experience, we shifted our “center of gravity” to East Africa, positioning our staff and operations as close as possible to our government partners, the CHWs we support, and the communities we serve.

This commitment increased African representation within our senior leadership roles and rooted our leadership, decision-making, and organizational culture in East Africa. Currently, 98% of our staff are African and based in Africa. Our governing board and global leadership team now feature 50% African representation, doubling since 2018.  As part of these ongoing efforts, we prioritized two key initiatives last year to empower and develop senior leaders below the executive level.

First, we established a new leadership group, called the Global Leadership Council (GLC), comprising of 19 directors or function heads, to complement our existing 8-person Global Executive Team (GET). The GLC was formed after a staff-led consultative process. We previously had a Global Management Team, but surveys and focus groups revealed it was too big and its purpose and role were unclear.

Our GET and GLC now convene quarterly to deliberate on key strategic topics and GLC members regularly feed into the various steering committees and technical working groups (TWGs). During their first joint retreat, they discussed how to strengthen a culture of psychological safety, fostering an environment where every individual can contribute in their unique ways and explored how to ingrain this in our organizational fabric.

Second, we invested in a 10-month Emerging Senior Leadership Development Program in collaboration with the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in South Africa. The inaugural cohort of six employees graduated in August. ‘Participating in the GIBS leadership course helped me to see the connection between self-awareness and effective leadership—which inspires and empowers others to grow.

That is the kind of leader I want to be,’ says Dr. Stella Kanyerere, Deputy Country Director/Director Program Delivery, Uganda.  Though more work remains, we are proud of our progress, reflected in our annual anonymous Voices Survey. Of the core elements surveyed in 2023, staff scored improvements in 14 out of 15, with a remarkable 96% response rate. Leadership was the most improved index in the year.