The ACTION Support Centre facilitated a session during a two day workshop on transformative leaders for the Stop Stock Outs Project (SSP) participants drawn from 8 provinces in South Africa.
The Stop Stock Outs Project is a national campaign to assist the thousands of health care users whose lives remain threatened by the chronic plague of essential medication stock outs. The consortium members include MSF, the RHAP, RuDASA, SA HIV Clinician’s Society, SECTION27 and the TAC.
The Training of Trainers workshop aimed to engage the SSP Trainers to ensure that they improve their skills to effectively mobilize communities and build on their capacity to become leaders within their communities. This will form the foundation through which the SSP Trainers will have the capacity to effectively respond to medicine stock outs and shortages through implementing the knowledge and skills which they will have acquired from the workshop as well as mobilize communities and encourage them to report.
The general objective was capacity building for the SSP Trainers Programme to raise awareness around medicines stock outs and shortages and mobilize communities to report on stock outs.
The transformative leadership training has an indepth focus on identity and self-understanding as a form of reflective learning and redefining values, principles and how the individual fits within the collective.
Additional fundamental elements of transformative leadership explored include, intentions, techniques and qualities of leadership, identifying practical challenges in the workplace, and addressing them using a problem solving approach.
The way forward proposed by this training session focussed on unpacking the meaning of collaborative leadership, identifying relevant and ethical roles and responsibilities of leaders, including sharing ideas that will form part of a Leadership Development Plan for the participants. The Leadership Development Plan will be use as a collective leadership guide for the participants.