Over 30 public health professionals with expertise in HIV, malaria, family planning and maternal and child health from across Tanzania gathered in Dar es Salaam to attend a workshop on Leadership in Strategic Health Communication. The two-week workshop, which runs from October 10 to 22, is being facilitated by Ben Lozare, Director of Training and Capacity Building at CCP, and Elizabeth Serlemitsos, Senior Program Officer in CCP’s Tanzania office.

Participatory and engaging, the Strategic Health Communication workshop challenges participants to imagine new visions for their organizations, visions that are not “achievable under current conditions,” says Lozare.

Indeed, Lozare explains, “The purpose of a vision [should be] to change the conditions,” and it is the role of the leader to “address the things that are from difficult to the things that are beyond imagination. Good leaders are not the ones addressing the things that are easy.”

Equipping leaders with the skills and tools they need to achieve their visions is the goal of the Leadership in Strategic Health Communication workshop. It addresses a wide range of topics, from the communication process and basics of social and behavioral communication, to leadership concepts in program design, and introduces participants to the SCOPE (Strategic Communication Planning and Evaluation) tool, a facilitated computer-based instrument.

Lozare and Serlemitsos last facilitated a workshop together in Tanzania in 1994. Since that time, CCP has conducted 179 workshops in 27 countries, reaching over 3000 participants. The alumni network in Tanzania alone is over 100.