Reaching across the linguistic divide in management and leadership education
Authors: Erika Linnander, Sylvie Kwedi Nolna, Aziza Mwinsongo, Kali Bechtold, Yap Boum
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2019)

The systematic exclusion of French in global health publications, as highlighted by Anne Roca and colleagues in The Lancet Global Health,1Roca A Boum Y Wachsmuth I Plaidoyer contre l'exclusion des francophones dans la recherche en santé mondiale.Lancet Glob Health. 2019; 7: e701-e702Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (14) Google Scholar is not exclusive to researchers. Evidence2Chastonay P Moretti R Zesiger V et al.Health workforce development: a needs assessment study in French speaking African countries.Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2013; 18: 265-277Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar suggests that public health practitioners who do not speak English are also excluded from capacity-building efforts in management and leadership. Closing this gap is urgent. The health systems of French-speaking African countries like Niger lag in major indicators of performance, including immunisation. Few management and leadership development programmes are designed with, and for, francophone people in the region. The Expanded Program on Immunization Leadership and Management Program (EPI LAMP) aims to bridge this gap by providing the leadership and management capacity required to achieve immunisation targets. Commissioned by Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, EPI LAMP is a 9-month certificate programme for teams of national EPI managers and officials from the Ministries of Health of Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, DR Congo, and Guinea. The programme's blended educational model includes e-learning, in-person forums, and a team-based breakthrough project to improve the performance of EPI. The programme highlights the value of diversity, bringing country delegations together for information exchange across cultural and contextual boundaries. The programme's strength lies in its integrated approach to partnership. The Global Health Leadership Initiative of Yale University (New Haven, USA) anchors the leadership and management curriculum. PATH (Seattle, USA), a global team of innovators in immunisation and other global health priorities, enriches the partnership by addressing the most pressing issues in national immunisation programmes. For anglophone participants, the University of Global Health Equity (Kigali, Rwanda) is the host organisation for in-person forums. For francophone participants, the University of Yaoundé I (Yaoundé, Cameroon) will deliver the programme by engaging research and innovation expertise from Epicentre (Yaoundé, Cameroon), which supports Médecins Sans Frontières through field epidemiology activities, training sessions, and research projects, and policy and practice expertise from the Cameroon's Ministry of Health. This diverse consortium of implementers is a platform for country delegations and partners to engage in a learning environment that overcomes traditional linguistic limitations. In April, 2019, the French-speaking partners in EPI LAMP met for a 3-day event aiming to ensure that the programme's content is not only translated into French but contextualised for the francophone regions of Africa. The partners strongly agreed that (1) programmes such as EPI LAMP can build leadership and management capacities in many languages and (2) the University of Yaoundé I and similar institutions, in their dual-language capacity, are integral to such collaborations that transverse linguistic barriers. The partners welcomed the first EPI LAMP francophone participants in Yaoundé in June, 2019, where they continued to build on the exchange platform to ensure that "no one is left behind" because of linguistic barriers. We declare no competing interests. The French version of this Correspondence is in the appendix. Download .pdf (.19 MB) Help with pdf files Supplementary appendix Plaidoyer contre l'exclusion des francophones dans la recherche en santé mondialeL'anglais est la langue dominante dans les sciences et a fortiori dans la recherche en santé mondiale.1 Sans une langue commune, le partage des connaissances et la collaboration seraient certes impossibles, mais l'utilisation quasi-exclusive de l'anglais a un impact indéniable sur le travail des chercheurs dont ce n'est pas la langue maternelle. Les appels d'offre des bailleurs de fonds, les revues médicales les plus influentes, les conférences internationales les plus prestigieuses auxquelles il est important de participer, sont dans leur grande majorité anglophones. Full-Text PDF Open Access