Senior Leadership Program

From the 16-20th of March 2015, ICRC-SFD collaborated with the American University of Yale to organize the first workshop in the frame of the Senior Leadership Program (SLP) under the funding of USAID. The SLP will run on for 9 months starting from this first workshop to November of this year. SLP is a special program for senior leaders who make the decisions from South East Asian countries including Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines and Vietnam. The purpose of SLP is to strengthen the leadership, management, and governance capacity of high-level decisions makers to address challenges and achieve results that are important to improving the quality of life for persons with disabilities in their community, region, and nation. The ICRC, specifically the ICRC-SFD in Vietnam, has invited the leaders including Head of Rehabilitation Division from the Ministry of Health; Head of Social Work Department from Vietnam Red Cross; Director of Action to the Community Development Center, Director of Ho Chi Minh Rehabilitation and Orthopedic Center and a National Advisor on Disability. All participants are working in the field of rehabilitation and disability and they believe that disability and rehabilitation issues should be paid more attention by different stakeholders in Vietnam at present. Members of the Vietnamese Group have had the chance to discuss the emerging national rehabilitation and disability issues and feasible solving plans through the lecturers from the University of Yale on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities (UNCRPD), governance, leadership, root causes analyses and the results of the Team’s work. Meanwhile, the members of the Vietnamese Team have had the chance to get accustomed with and to listen on about the current situation of disability and rehabilitation within the participating States and their solution plans. This is a program with high interaction levels between individual teams and, between the teams and the academic lecturers. Once this workshop is over, the Country Teams will continue to work locally on the issues and the purpose of solving these issues before the second workshop takes place in June of 2015. The ICRC-SFD is playing the facilitation role to support and connect member to member as well as the Vietnamese team with instructors from Yale University in order to effectively and successfully complete the SLP.