Cheryl Francisconi is an international pioneer in designing and implementing leadership strategies at the country level to meet the needs of local and emerging leaders by providing them with the supports they need to take their leadership to the next level, including being part of an in-country leadership network. LLC had the pleasure of working with Cheryl on a reproductive health leadership evaluation in the mid-2000s. As a program director, Cheryl always advocated for leadership approaches that were responsive to the needs of participants. Too often leadership programs provide a one size fits all curriculum, with no plans for follow-on engagement of alumni. Not so for the Leadership Development for Mobilizing Reproductive Health program that Cheryl ran, which was a model of a more sustainable and impactful approach to developing and supporting leadership in developing countries, like Ethiopia. Cheryl always speaks with passion, clarity, and deep credibility about what it takes to support leadership in ways that are sustainable and impactful over the long haul.
Since I joined the Institute of International Education in 2006, I have had the opportunity to develop and manage the implementation of several unique leadership programs which IIE has implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ethiopian Women's Leadership Program (EWLP) is one of the programs we are most proud of and I credit LLC for inspiring us to look at how to measure its impact. In Ethiopia, 80% of young women in the first year of university drop out before they complete the year due to various challenges, including economic, social and academic vulnerability. Many come from the countryside and are not prepared for the culture shock related to university life. Since only 27% of women eligible for university actually enroll, and since so many drop out, the majority of young women in Ethiopia are not able to get the university education so important for their future and the future of their families and children.
The EWLP exposes them to a nine-month leadership program, which includes a two-day leadership retreat, weekly sessions on leadership and life skills, a service-learning component, and a community event which links them to prominent women leaders in their community. Through my discussions with LLC and my exposure to the work Claire Reinalt has done with leadership evaluation, I have become committed to doing more to document the impact of leadership development programs and to share those results with others. We wanted to know whether our intervention was making a difference in the lives of the girls we support and we developed a comparison research study to see whether the educational outcomes improved for our students. We also wanted to know whether their attitudes about gender, about health, and about women's rights had changed as a result of our program.
We were excited when the research showed a marked difference between the two groups - not just because it demonstrated success but because, more importantly, we have been able to use the data to advocate for program sustainability in the universities in which we work. As a result of the evaluation, each of the four universities are now committing their own funds to continue the program in the future. This is as important to us as designing and delivering a good program, since we want to have a transformative effect, not just on the young women in our program, but in the university systems that need to support them. While I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and not always able to participate in all of LLC's activities, I am grateful to have stayed connected, to participate in the webinars, to read the blog, and to learn from the LLC community, especially in the areas of networking and leadership evaluation. LLC has been a great resource and an inspiration to me and to my colleagues at IIE.
"Image Source: Cheryl Francisconi 2012"
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