How can leadership skills be harnessed to achieve social impact?
How can teams of leaders from all over the world come together to improve the cervical cancer landscape in Tanzania?
How can the challenges of the pandemic and the shift to virtual working be transformed into exciting new opportunities?
These are the key challenges posed to leaders at the beginning of Pepal’s iNJIA programme, which is a collaboration between Pepal, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (Roche), the Government of Tanzania, ICAP and McBride & Lucius.
Sister. Victoria Mutatina, Head of Nursing for the Muleba District in Kagera Region, Tanzania, was one of the leaders who rose to this challenge. As part of a diverse and energetic team of leaders from all over the world, named Team Muleba, Sister Victoria co-created an innovative project designed to integrate cervical cancer prevention within schools in Tanzania.
“The commitment from participants from all over the world has been inspiring and it has been wonderful to witness the passion of all NJIA participants to help women in Kagera.”
Team Muleba, alongside three other highly motivated teams, began their journey by connecting as a team and deep-diving into the journeys they had been on to make them the leaders they are today.
Through a series of leadership development workshops, the teams identified various competencies that they would like to improve on to become more effective leaders, and to develop agile and creative mindsets that can mitigate the challenges and uncertainties within their work.
Participants then had the opportunity to test themselves by co-creating and implementing innovative projects that contribute to improving cervical cancer prevention and treatment throughout two regions in Tanzania. The projects had a low-budget to maximise innovation, and the teams needed to draw on their individual and collective leadership skills, and their motivation to make a difference.
Sister Victoria and her Muleba team decided to focus on schools through an education and awareness project. So far, the team have designed materials to disseminate information regarding cervical cancer treatment and prevention, which have been tailored to target the individual roles that pupils, parents and teachers can play. The team have successfully engaged with three schools who have confirmed their involvement with the project.
“I learnt a lot of things, I gained great experiences by working with lots of people from different countries. I feel empowered and passionate about going into communities and educating women of all ages to prevent this problem (cervical cancer). ”
Similarly, Team Ngara’s innovation project centred around integrating cervical cancer prevention and treatment within the education system, utilising teachers as multipliers. They have successfully piloted their project and vaccinated girls with the HPV vaccine, screen teachers for pre-cancerous lesions, and hold meetings with parents.
Team Kagera, focused on integrating cervical cancer within current breast cancer prevention and treatment services by empowering and mentoring community health workers to engage with women and advise them on the benefits of accessing screening services for both forms of cancer. In the past four months, the team have created awareness and communication materials as well as screening manuals. Team Kagera have also begun to pilot community health worker mentoring at two health centres.
Team Karagwe created a recognition project designed to reward and thus incentivise women to attend cervical cancer screening sites. The team have conducted interviews at screening sites to learn more about their current situations and challenges. They have also successfully on-boarded several sites to align staff with the specific award process.
All four teams have made promising progress. The solutions that the teams have designed are low-cost and innovative, with leadership at their core. Participants from all teams highlighted the value of patience, connection and unity to their team’s successes. They also learnt to “break the mindset of scarcity”, shifting towards a creative mindset that focuses on leveraging what they have, rather than worrying about what they don’t.
“I learned to not worry about money. I learnt to take a step and try, regardless of the limited resources we may have.”
Moving forward, the teams have two months remaining to finalise their projects and consolidate their impact.