On Friday 17th February 2017, Makerere University School of Public Health-ResilientAfrica Network was privileged to host visitors from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy (HLA) and the Kenya Red Cross Society, both based in Nairobi-Kenya. The Humanitarian Leadership Academy was represented by Mr. John Ndiru who works as the Learning and Knowledge Management Advisor at the Kenya Academy Centre, while Ms. Priyanka Patel represented the Kenya Red Cross Society where she serves as the Program Officer for Innovations.
The Humanitarian Leadership Academy, through the Kenya Academy Centre Office, supports the humanitarian sector across the East African Region by collaborating with established institutions to harness skills for effective and efficient humanitarian response. By so doing, the academy centre enables people to be better prepared when disasters strike.
The meeting was arranged following an agreement between HLA and the Makerere University School of public Health-ResilientAfrica Network to deliver a Certificate Course in Humanitarian and Disaster Resilience Leadership. The course is intended to strengthen the capacity of humanitarian and disaster resilience practitioners so as to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Disaster Risk Reduction programming.
During this meeting, the three institutions discussed ways through which they could collaborate in the area of managing innovations. The parties brainstormed on the role of innovations in solving humanitarian problems in the East African Region and highlighted some of the development challenges that the region faces and how these institutions could join forces in providing contextually-relevant innovative solutions.
The meeting was concluded by proposing that RAN drafts a brief highlighting some of the next programmatic steps that could be of value in moving the innovation agenda forward. This concept note was meant to define some of the low hanging fruits that the partners could agree and focus on moving forward.
