The LGT Fellowship – A Potential Matchmaker? 

By Peace Kadondi, LGT Impact Fellow for AMP Health, South Africa

C.S. Lewis, the famous writer of the Chronicles of Narnia said, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!” I don’t know what the equivalent of that is on a professional’s career journey, but it is what happened with AMP Health.

Before I applied to the LGT fellowship, I asked an ex-fellow for some advice. It would become one of the most valuable pieces of career advice I have ever received. Since we could only submit one application, Lillian Kahara told me to consider applying to the organization I believed would allow me to bring, and grow, the best version of myself to the work they did. It also needed to be the organisation whose vision I resonated with the most. With this lens, I went back to the list of LGT’s portfolio organizations and their corresponding roles. AMP Health suddenly looked like it wore a coat of many colours and stood out from the options on the shortlist.

AMP Health is a non-profit organization based out of South Africa whose mission is to support African governments to build visionary and effective public sector teams by helping them develop and institutionalise the leadership and management (L&M) capabilities needed to realise ambitious goals.

Their approach to actualizing this mission is based on the premise that Well-functioning health systems require teams with strong leadership and management able to put policies and structures in place that allow them to deliver quality care and respond to changing circumstances. Many aspects of delivering care are not clinical but instead are related to data and information, communication, supply chains, logistics, human resources, finance, and governance. We support teams to achieve their goals more effectively. Our focus on leadership and management skills enables us to partner with teams across a range of programmes in public health – and beyond.

With a personal commitment to exploring the impact leadership and management competencies have on value delivery in Africa, AMP Health’s mandate aligned perfectly with my own mission to cultivate the leadership capabilities of Africans tackling some of our critical questions in a scalable way. Being part of the AMP Health team is a great opportunity to answer my questions about the 20% which could move the needle on the 80% of innovative and impact driven initiatives in Africa. Through the LGT Fellowship, I found an organisation with people to whom I said, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!”.

Picture: AMP Health’s Global Team convening in Johannesburg, South Africa, in November 2023.