A recent coming together of corporate alumni to both celebrate project achievements and re-visit their leadership journeys inspired the Pepal team to reflect on one of our key programmatic strengths - sustainability. The impact of Pepal programmes are sustained in several ways 1) through maintaining long-term partnerships 2) through the affinity alumni form with the programme, often viewing it as a key moment in their journey as a leader, and 3) through the continuation of impactful innovation projects.
Corporate Alumni Networks:
At the close of 2020, 34 alumni from Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson (Janssen), gathered online for the bi-annual ‘Friends of Pepal’ meeting. Over the last 10 years, 100+ Janssen colleagues have contributed to leadership and social impact programmes in Uganda and Myanmar. Their feedback, advocacy and support for the partnership has ensured that it flourished.
“The whole Pepal initiative started with a crazy idea and almost unreachable goals. Over the years, a large group of motivated and dedicated people have added their two cents and what we realised; this is magic.”
Pepal programmes have had a significant impact on Janssen alumni: many alumni tell us they return to work with a new mindset, increased self-awareness and a drive to seek new professional opportunities. However, one recurrent theme is the motivation to continue supporting Pepal's work and to advocate for our unique leadership approach, the motivation behind establishing the ‘Friends of Pepal’ network.
“I’m very happy to see many Janssen colleagues joining the Pepal challenge and inspiring others to cross borders.”
In 2020, Pepal mobilised the alumni energy from within Janssen to sustain our leadership initiatives in Uganda. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that face-to-face programmes were postponed, therefore, o support Baylor-Uganda (Janssen’s long-term NGO partner in Uganda) through the evolving crisis, 13 Janssen alumni dedicated significant amounts of their time to support leadership and crisis capacity building alongside Baylor’s Human Resources and Leadership and Governance departments.
Innovation Projects:
Each Pepal leadership cohort develops a set of projects which are tested for six months. When projects show signs of success, Pepal works with our NGO partners to try to scale them. Innovations requiring little to no external investment can quickly be scaled and sustained for many years – achieving real impact. Sustainable innovations often don't introduce anything radically 'new', but instead encourage leaders to change or adapt how they approach work, collaborate and leverage existing resources.
Caring Together, was a programme run between 2015 – 2018 in partnership with Baylor-Uganda and Janssen. The associated innovations continue to be some of the most successful and widely used among Pepal’s NGO and government partners.
Above: A ‘Team Performance Monitoring Tool’ in use at a health centre in 2020, two years after the project ended.
The Caring Together innovations are very simple. For example, tracking and monitoring staff late arrivals by drawing a red line in a health facility registration book. Simple ideas like this are highly effective because they both strengthen management and work practices, and are little to no cost. The Caring Together innovations have become a set of tools which are now a central feature of Baylor's health system strengthening approach in Rwenzori region, Uganda. The number of facilities utilising the tools is tracked across 140 health facilities every quarter:
The above data monitors the use of the Caring Together tools from the end of 2020. It shows that several of the tools are still being used by almost all of the 140 health facilities.
The innovations have proved so successful that senior Baylor staff have attributed progress in maternal-child health outcomes in Rwenzori to the strength of leadership and governance structures at the health facilities. Baylor continues to have ambitious plans for leadership in 2021 and intends to further scale the Caring Together tools to new health facilities in other regions.
In 2021, Pepal will continue to focus on sustainability through partnerships, profound leadership journeys and impactful innovation projects in our virtual programmes!