Participants in the first East African Women’s Leadership Consortium, which took place in Tanzania in February 2024.
Published August 13, 2024 under Around DGHI
When Deborah Koltai, Ph.D., attended the first East African Partners meeting in 2023, the purpose was to expand research collaborations between the Duke Global Health Institute and its partners in the region. But one topic kept coming up among the women at the meeting.
“There was a broad desire for professional and leadership development amongst us, although we are advanced scholars,” says Koltai, an associate professor of psychiatry, neurosurgery and neurology at Duke and a DGHI affiliate. “We wanted to do this training together [not in separate cohorts] because we work in the global health space together.”
That desire came to fruition in February, when Koltai helped organize the first East African Women’s Leadership Consortium at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi, Tanzania. A dozen women, representing universities and research facilities from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, participated in the workshop, which was funded by DGHI as an outgrowth of the 2023 partnership meeting.
Over two days, the women participated in team-based exercises and shared personal experiences and lessons learned during their research careers. The sessions were led by Dorothy Siaw-Asemoah, Ph.D., from the Center for Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness at the University of Buffalo. By event’s end, attendees gave themselves the moniker “Rockstar Women Scholars” as a nod to their strength and cohesion.
Koltai is a co-principal investigator of the consortium along with Blandina Mmbaga, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute and an adjunct professor with DGHI. She hopes to secure additional funding to host a second workshop for junior researchers.
“It’s important to make sure women, in these settings, support each other and maintain morale to keep the work going,”she says. “It’s important to develop these relationships where women can support each other in partnerships and development, because together, we build communities with our work.”
